The Huntress

by TheLiteraryEscapist

Beacon Hills is a city which literally draws the supernatural to it. Adrianna is the daughter no one knew Kate Argent had. Follow Adrianna Argent, a born hunter, lethal weapon, and struggling demigod as she tries to come to grips with her mother's murder. Will she follow the code or will she follow her heart?

13. Chapter 13

13-Endgame Part 1

T hey'd failed. Each and every one of them had failed.

The plan didn't matter anymore, even if it had been the only thing to not backfire in Scott's face. Now, it was irrelevant.

And all because of Derek and Peter. It had been their impatience and fear that had trampled over Jackson's moment of clarity as Lydia had forced his humanity to resurface. In a way, what was to come would be their faults.

Scott shook his head, trying to brush away the trepidation he felt every time he so much as glanced in the direction of the wall across from him. It wasn't so much a wall, now, as it was a giant hole in the shape of the winged creature that the Kanima had transformed into. If he looked past it, into the distant horizon of abandoned warehouses just outside the town's limits, Scott could swear he could still see the dragon-like body of the Kanima as it clumsily flew towards the heart of Beacon Hills.

He knew what would happen when it reached it's destination. Scott shivered as he imagined the destruction, the screams, the falling buildings and dying people. It would be a nightmare. A massacre.

I have to stop it. Scott realized grimly, his shoulders straightening out of the defeated hunch they had fallen into, and his fists clenching by his sides as Scott swept his eyes around the assembled group that was still at each other's throats, in a slightly more metaphorical way. We have to stop it.

He twisted his jaw nervously, his ears picking up the hostile voices and speedy heartbeats, looking for an opportunity to interrupt. But first, he had to be certain about one thing.

"Stiles," Scott whispered to his best friend, who was standing conveniently beside him, rubbing at his forehead like he was developing a migraine. "We're good, right? You're still with me on this?"

He needed to know that the boy who was like a brother in every way but blood, would be standing by his side as he undertook the impossible task laid out for them. Scott could convince the others, he could be the leader they all looked to for the hard decisions, as long as Stiles Stilinski had his back.

Looking up, Stiles' bloodshot eyes connected with Scott's. His friend was tired, that much was obvious, and the sinister bruises framing his eyes and the bottom of his jaw spoke of a physical harm that Scott hadn't been aware of until then. A flare of protective anger caught in Scott's stomach, forcing it to tighten painfully.

"Yeah, you know I am." Stiles firmly replied, jarring Scott out of his rapidly returning hatred for the most likely person to have hurt Stiles—Gerard Argent. "Besides, there's gotta be someone here that can keep the rest of you sane." He tried to joke.

Scott smiled, not really feeling the humor of it as Adrianna and Isaac's approaching figures drew his attention away from the stare-down going on between Allison and Derek.

They were speaking in light voices, worried expressions marring their features. Scott couldn't hear what they were saying, but he knew it could only have been about two things. Gerard, or the Kanima, the former of which Scott hadn't seen since the last battle with the Kanima's beta form.

Adrianna's sharp gaze flicked over to Scott, narrowing slightly as she noticed how intently he was focused on them. Disentangling her hand from where it was clutched within Isaac's, Adrianna pressed her lips shut once they were within earshot.

"Is everything okay?" He automatically wondered, forcing himself not to cringe even as the words rung hollow and false in the air.

Adrianna snorted, rolling her eyes. "You're kidding, right? Things are about as far away from okay as they can get." She retorted hotly. "We're so screwed." Adrianna added in a lower voice, raspy with an emotion that he might have thought to be fear, if Scott didn't know her as well as he did.

This was something different. She was angry—her fiery gaze and unusually flushed cheeks told him that much—but she wasn't angry at him. Not when she could look him in the eye with such intensity that Scott shuffled on the spot.

"That's got to be the most accurate statement I've heard all day." Peter Hale chimed in, lifting his foot away from where it had been stomping over the unconscious body of a random hunter. Scott doubted the man was alive any more. "Tell me, Scott, what is it that you planned on doing after you took out Gerard. Or did you not think that far ahead?" He mocked relentlessly.

Scott glanced between Adrianna—who was standing as rigid as he'd ever seen her, the sharp smell of her surprisingly clean blood invading his nostrils as her nails dug into her palms—and a very smug, slightly pissed Peter. Abruptly, as Isaac's hand found Adrianna's once more; not to support her, but to subtly hold her back from tearing into the recently revived Hale; the pieces clicked into place.

He should have seen it sooner.

"Our plan was flawless," Adrianna pronounced in a near growl. "And if I remember correctly, it's the only reason that Gerard wasn't able to kill Derek and enslave each wolf here under his brutal command."

"True enough," Peter's brows rose in dark amusement as he relished in Adrianna's spite. "But whatever it was able to do, the most important part of the whole damn thing, couldn't be stopped. The Kanima's mutated into it's strongest form. Good luck stopping it now."

Derek and Chris, who hadn't really been listening in on the argument until then, tuned into the conversation as Peter's voice rose in exasperation. Scott idly noted that Allison had yet to look away from Derek. She had a freakish focus, almost like she was shooting lasers into his back, or, more likely, drawing targets.

He didn't have as much time to feel disturbed about that as he should have, because the banter between Peter and Adrianna continued on regardless of what he thought.

"Listen honey," Adrianna drawled with false sweetness, the strain between Isaac's grip on her wrist becoming apparent as the muscles in her arms pulled taut, her dark blue veins rising to the surface. "I'm not the one responsible for destroying every last vestige of hope that there was for Jackson to regain control and destroy the Kanima on his own. I'm not the one that screwed up, here."

"Oh," Peter's eyes light up with manic fire. His teeth seemed longer when he spoke, almost like he was on the verge of unleashing his wolf form. "So this is all my fault, now? You're really going to put all of the blame on me?" He demanded of her. "If you want to play that game, you should really be wary of the blood on your own hands, before you go accusing other people of their mistakes."

Adrianna balked, stepping into Isaac's chest as she moved away from Peter. Her wet gaze glistened for a second before her features hardened into solid marble; cold and unforgiving.

"I may have taken lives before, and my hands are as drenched in red as anyone else's," She admitted, her back still firmly pressed against Isaac's front. "But at least I never killed family for power."

Scott remembered Laura Hale even as Isaac and Allison appeared confused. The body in the woods that he and Stiles had trekked out to find. The murder that had started it all. Peter's lips rose in a snarl. Adrianna glared back evenly. Scott felt a sliver of chilling dread stab his heart as Derek stared at his uncle with renewed hurt. Chris appeared to try to stay neutral, even as he glanced in Scott's direction.

Just like before, he could feel it as the battle lines were painted down with invisible ink. If he didn't do something fast, they'd tear each other apart before they even had a chance to save Jackson from the monster he'd become, for the second time.

"Okay, that's enough." Scott interceded, his words coming out raspy and quieter than he'd intended.

"Enough?" Peter mimed, his feral gaze sliding over to Scott for a moment. "No, we're just getting started." Stretching his arm out towards Adrianna, Peter's lips curled into a cruel smirk as he went on, trampling over any attempts Scott could have made to salvage the situation. "This girl is Kate's daughter and the only reason she's here is to get her revenge. I doubt Kate would be a very good mother, so I'm betting you were raised by Gerard. Am I right?" He wondered offhandedly as Scott noticed Adrianna's skin draining of it's healthy flush, turning white as a sheet.

Her lip pinched between her teeth as raw hatred burned in her eyes. Scott had the sudden desire to warn Peter of the possible consequences to his prodding, but he thought better of it when Adrianna's harsh gaze slid over to him for a moment, freezing his insides solid.

"I'm gonna take that as a yes." Peter recklessly assumed as Adrianna remained silent. There was something cold and stale in the air around them. It reminded Scott of death. "So, being raised by the leader of the Argents means that she's been trained for one perfect reason—" Peter paused dramatically. "To kill werewolves."

The information floated around in Scott's head. He'd always known it, but hearing it out loud made it that much more real. Across from him, Scott saw Allison's expression sour even further. It was almost like, instead of fearing her cousin for her brutal knowledge, she envied her.

"So?" Isaac voiced through the hush, his tone sounding slightly offended. "What does that prove?" He went on, gaining confidence with each word, even as Peter tried to intimidate him with his stare. "We all knew who she was the moment we met her. Sure, she's got a bit of a dark side and she makes mistakes, but don't we all? It doesn't make her a bad person."

Peter had the audacity to laugh, loud and deep as he pressed a hand to his chest. "You actually think you know who she is?" He growled after he'd managed to catch his breath. "Even if you have gotten to know her, that doesn't mean that you've seen every shameful secret and dangerous habit. She could still be hiding things from you, and that's not even getting into what she is."

"Don't you dare." Adrianna snarled out of nowhere, her voice echoing inside the warehouse and amplifying. There was evident anger, hot and barely restrained, but it was the undercurrents of alarm and indignity that surprised Scott most.

She was hiding something, clinging to her secret's disguise with a desperate strength Scott didn't think she had in her. And Peter, it seemed, knew what the truth was.

"Adrianna's a hunter." Chris evenly interrupted, stepping away from Allison to stand closer to the group where tensions were on the rise. "And sometimes, that means that she's a killer." He shared, undiluted honesty rasping his words. "But other times, it means that she's a hero."

Scott thought about those words. Killer. Hero. So different, he would have thought that in anyone else, they would never have been present at the same time. Yet, with Adrianna, the contradiction worked. She was good and bad at the same time. Cruel and compassionate. Loving and gentle, but so filled with hate, that Scott wondered if it would soon consume everything else that made her who she was.

But still, the nagging understanding that Scott had yet to find out what she was—because it had already been clearly established that she wasn't human—remained at the back of Scott's mind, fogging all of his other thoughts until it was all that remained.

"Right!" Peter unexpectedly agreed with Chris. "She's a killer, and judging from what I've seen and personally felt from Kate, there's a particular brand of psychosis that runs in the family." He bluntly stated, oblivious to, or totally ignoring the way every Argent's posture stiffened as they each collectively reached for their weapons. "What's to say that, one day, she won't snap, just like her mother did? What's stopping her from burning the house down around all of us?"

"Nothing." Derek echoed his uncle's position, frowning as he stared at Adrianna, shuffling towards Peter so that his alliance to the man was openly known.

Scott, much like everyone else, looked to Adrianna for answers. As much as he didn't want to pry into her no doubt painful past, he had to know that his trust in her had not been misplaced. More importantly, he needed to know if she trusted him, at all.

"When my mother set your home on fire," Adrianna began thickly, stepping away from Isaac so that she was standing on her own against them all. "When Kate killed your family," Adrianna's stare locked with Derek for a moment, intense and completely unapologetic, despite the meaning behind her words. "She wasn't crazy."

Scott could hear his heart in his ears. He shook his head, trying to understand the picture Adrianna had painted. It was like one of those optical illusions, where you knew there was something cohesive hidden inside the pattern, but you just couldn't figure out how you had to look at it, to see it.

Adrianna's voice lowered as her eyes took on a faraway sheen to them. "That came much later." She seemed to recall the exact moment, her hands tightening even more and her brows pinching, but didn't elaborate any further.

"I don't get it." Scott dumb-foundedly stated. "You're saying that Kate knew what she was doing when she started that fire?" Even to his own ears, the words sounded unusual, verging on insane.

Derek and Peter were strangely silent. They seemed to be just as perplexed by the information as the rest of them, although Peter looked like he had more knowledge to base Adrianna's claims on, than anyone else. The fact that Peter didn't dispute Adrianna's words, forced a chill up Scott's spine because it meant that even he could see truth hidden behind her raw admission.

"I'm saying," Adrianna replied, her characteristically shrewd green eyes landing on him and burning the skin as though she could see into his soul. "That you don't have to be psychotic to be a killer. You just need a reason."

And for some unnerving reason, Scott got the feeling that she wasn't just talking about Kate.

"In case you've forgotten, Peter." Adrianna's feet pivoted much like a ballerina's as she turned to face the man in question, her once fragile smile turning coy and harmful. "You've given me plenty."

Peter swallowed thickly. For the first time ever, Scott thought he saw a glimmer of well-placed hesitation and possibly fear flashing in the older man's gaze, but in the next instant, it was gone. The two of them were nearly a match for each other in the art of deception. Scott dreaded to think what would happen if they decided to kill each other, and who would win.

"Well, that's insightful and all," Stiles sarcastically said, his words grounding Scott and reminding him what the real objective was. "But I don't see how it's going to stop the Kanima and save Jackson."

Scott noticed his best friend's stare flick over to Lydia, who he'd nearly forgotten in the hazy after-effects of the battle. She nodded her head, makeup streaking her pale cheeks as she seemed to hiccup. If Scott hadn't been so surprised about her actual acknowledgment of Stiles, he would have felt the hard pit of guilt that dropped into his stomach with greater acuity.

"Okay, you're right." Scott lightly responded to Stiles, feeling his insides beginning to shiver as he stepped up to the open plate of team leader. "Peter, Derek; I need you to fill everyone in on what you were able to learn about the Kanima's new form." He ordered with more strength in his voice.

"I'm pretty sure all of our ammo has been used up and we could definitely use some time to gather our strength." He thought to himself, biting his lip as he understood the possible consequence a break might mean for Beacon Hills and it's population. But Scott also knew that, without time to recharge from their first battle, his assortment of wolves and hunters wouldn't stand a chance against the monstrous creature the Kanima had turned into. "We'll regroup at the animal hospital. Hopefully, Deaton will have some insights that'll help us find a way to save Jackson."

If it isn't already too late, he silently added as the faces of friends and enemies alike, stared back at him, absorbing his instructions readily.

"Sounds good to me." Isaac was the first to chip in his opinion, moving to stand beside Scott and Stiles.

"My father's responsible for unleashing that monster." Chris spoke for himself and Allison as he slid his pistol into it's holster on his outer thigh. "I have a responsibility to stop it." Together, the father-daughter duo stepped forward, ready to follow Scott.

Peter and Derek shared a glance. A silent conversation passed between them before they turned to Scott. "What the hell," Derek gruffly exclaimed. "Why not?"

Nodding his head in satisfaction, Scott's gaze drifted over to Adrianna, who was the last of them yet to make up her mind. "This is wrong." She told him, her chin tilting so that she could look out at the hole in the wall where the Kanima had broken free. "I've hunted things like this before. Waiting is a mistake. You'll only give it more time to wreak destruction and death across this town."

"What choice do I have?" Scott shot back as calmly as he could, even when he felt a nagging panic blossom within him, urging him to listen to Adrianna's advice. "We don't know what we're up against yet. If we go out there now, we're flying blind."

"I know what we're up against." Adrianna kept her stare firmly on Scott. Her palms rested on the handles of her long hunting knives. "And if you give it the chance, if you wait too long, there won't be anything left of Beacon Hills for you to save."

"You can go out if you want to. No one's stopping you." He reminded her, carefully hiding the fear of going into a battle without one of his best fighters and strategists, which pinched every exposed nerve in his body. "I have to take the risk." He explained, hoping uselessly that he could persuade her to join him one last time. "Jackson doesn't have that many chances at being saved. I don't want to blow this just because I rushed in, unprepared."

Adrianna didn't move, her face the perfect mask of indifferent consideration. "Okay," She suddenly agreed, something sinister lurking in her carefully blank gaze. "For Jackson."

Scott didn't know what kind of connection Adrianna had with Jackson, but it was apparent by the way that Isaac's brows rose, his tongue darting out to moisten his lips, that it was stronger than anyone had imagined.

Allison and Chris walked out of the warehouse first, starting up one of the abandoned hunter's cars outside and screeching off towards the veterinary clinic. Derek and Peter split off in separate directions, presumably they were going to run all the way, which wasn't big news to Scott as—super-speed accounted for—he could have done the same thing and still beaten the cars.

Stiles climbed into his jeep, Adrianna stepping in behind him as he started the engine after a few unsuccessful attempts. It was then that Scott realized Lydia was still standing there, only a few feet in front of the blue, beaten up car Stiles illogically treasured, her fist clenched tightly around the very same key she'd offered to Jackson.

"Lydia," He started, gulping and starting again as his mouth ran dry. "Uh, maybe you should go home. We can drop you off on the way, if you want?" Scott suggested.

It took a moment for the red-head to react to Scott's words, turning so that she faced them. Out of the corner of his eye, Scott saw that Stiles and Adrianna were both watching the exchange closely.

"Home?" Lydia uttered brokenly, the first sound she'd made since Jackson had died in her arms and then transformed into the winged creature he was now.

"Yeah," Scott tentatively nodded his head, watching as Lydia's gaze became moist, tears threatening to fall. "It'll be safer for you if you don't get caught in the middle of this." He explained.

Lydia frowned, her fine brows pinching together and forming a set of worried lines across her forehead. "Safer..." She repeated quietly, testing the word out on her tongue.

"Scott, I don't think that's a good idea." Stiles hesitantly added, his voice shredding in some places as he seemed to try to keep his emotions for Lydia at bay and away from the conversation. "She wants to help." He finished shortly, never breaking his stare away from Lydia, although she was staring at the floor in an unfocused sort of trance.

"You think we should let her?" Scott couldn't help retorting with more force than he'd wanted. Too many good people had already been hurt because he'd let them help. Lydia couldn't be one of them. He knew, even without having to ask, that Stiles would never forgive himself if anything happened to her.

As Stiles pressed his lips together firmly, resolutely trying to hide the anguish Scott knew to be just beneath the surface, it was Adrianna that spoke. "Yes." She simply replied to Scott's question. "I think we should."

The youngest Argent didn't look away from where she was glaring heatedly out of the Jeep's front windshield and Scott thought he knew why. Ever since Lydia had poisoned all of them with wolf'sbane for her birthday party, there had been unusual distance between Adrianna and the red-head. Scott himself could still feel the slight sting of betrayal, even though he hadn't been, and still wasn't particularly close friends with Lydia. He could only imagine the hurt it would have caused an emotionally-estranged huntress like Adrianna, when one of her only friends had stabbed her in the back.

And yet, there Adrianna was, undeniably defending Lydia.

It puzzled Scott so profoundly, he didn't have time to come up with a rebuttal before Lydia did so for him, gathering herself up with strength and bravery he'd never expected from her, and holding back her tears with an eerie calm mask as her lips ceased their trembling.

"Jackson—" Lydia started, her voice cracking before she tried again. "I can't go home now. Not when he needs me." She nearly whined, her expression betraying just how little control she'd hastily managed to gain over her feelings. "Not when I might be the only one left that can still reach him inside that thing."

Scott shivered as he thought about the monster Jackson had become. How little hope they all had of stopping it. Still, Scott had to try. He wasn't totally naive. He knew it wasn't likely that they'd be able to save Jackson, but he owed it to his own sense of noble humanity which he'd clung to like a life-line ever since he'd stopped being human, to try his very best.

"He loves me." She assured Scott, several fat, shiny tears dripping down her already glistening cheeks. "Jackson loves me and I love him." Lydia fiercely re-enforced. "You have to let me help him. He's in there, somewhere. I know he is...he has to be." She finished lowly, her hand reaching up to press against her chest.

There was a big part of Scott that wanted to say no. He wanted to explain just how much danger Lydia would be putting herself in. How she wasn't ready for it—not trained or prepared in any way, shape, or form for the power, speed, agility, and sheer deadliness that Kanima's new form could possibly dish out.

But then Scott thought about himself and Allison. He loved her and he knew, somewhere trapped beneath the layers of brainwashing Gerard had inflicted on her, that Allison still loved him, too.

There wasn't anything that Scott wouldn't do for her. He'd run into a fire, stand between her and a bullet; he'd even give her up, if it meant that she was safe and happy again.

And Lydia—sweet, innocent, fragile, not really human, Lydia—was just trying to do the same thing for Jackson.

"Okay," Scott eventually said, hoping beyond reason that he wasn't making the biggest mistake of the night as he climbed into the front seat of the Jeep, beside Stiles. "Get in, we've got to bring you up to speed."

#-#-#-#-#

There had been a time when Adrianna would have enjoyed watching Beacon Hills—the town that had ruined so many lives, including her mother's—burned and reduced to rubble.

But now that she'd actually spent some time there, Adrianna could readily admit that all she felt was hollow dread at the prospect of watching another one of Gerard's plans devastate everything in it's way.

Unrolling the schematics and blue-prints Chris had helpfully provided across a stainless steel operating table, Adrianna tried to tune out the voices already screaming in her head. Death was closer than ever, all around her, nearly suffocating her. It followed the Alpha Kanima wherever it went, leaving it's stench to seep into the concrete buildings and roads.

"Right now, the Kanima is here." Adrianna pointed to a spot on the map comprised of mainly abandoned manufacturing plants, dotted with storage buildings and lots, a handful of miles away from the warehouse they'd all left behind. "It's only a few minutes away from the downtown core, and when it gets there, what it's done so far is going to look like child's play." She warned as Deaton approached, placing round, smooth-looking stones on each corner of the map so that it didn't curl back in on itself.

"What do you suggest we do?" Derek wondered, crossing his arms over his chest and hiding some of the bloody slashes in his shirt as he did so. "Basing our attack on a hunch that it's going towards the city doesn't seem like a good idea." He sourly added.

"Well," Adrianna stood away from the table, her shoulders rolling backwards, popping and cracking in complaint. "If you have a better idea, I'd love to hear it."

"Yes Derek," Peter Hale's drawling, silky smooth, covertly barraging voice chimed, causing the hairs on Adrianna's arms to stand on end and a muscle in her jaw to twitch irately. "Why don't you tell us what this brilliant, alternate plan is, or shut your mouth?" Acid dripped from his words as he still appeared to be holding a grudge with Derek for killing him.

Not that Adrianna cared. As Peter Hale's fingers danced across her shoulder when he passed her—casually inserting himself into the group gathered around the map—all that Adrianna could focus on was the cold, churning hatred in her gut, and how good it would feel when she finally got the chance to choke the life out of her mother's murderer.

"Shut up." Derek growled angrily, but didn't say anymore.

"Peter," Scott voiced from where he'd been carefully watching the exchange. "Why don't you fill us in on what you learned about the Kanima?" He ordered, more than suggested.

Despite the sickening rage burning in Adrianna's veins, an amused smirk curled her lips as Peter frowned but acquiesced to Scott's words. "I suppose you all know how it was created and why?" Peter loftily asked them, moving onwards even when he didn't get a reply. "The important part is that, once the master and servant strengthen their bond, the Kanima's purpose is moot. It doesn't have to conform to the rules. That's why Matt and Gerard were able to kill people that weren't murderers." He told them.

Adrianna frowned, her chin twitching as the urge to shake her head in dismay nearly overcame her. She was about to point out how vague and repetitive Peter's explanation was, before Allison beat her to it.

"We already know that." Allison roughly pushed her way through the loose circle that everyone had assembled in around the table which held all the maps, her elbows digging into Adrianna's side as she stood beside and slightly in front of her. "There was a South-American legend that I found in my family's bestiary that clarified why the Kanima killed all those people."

"The Argent bestiary—" Peter smiled nefariously. "Nothing can match it's vast knowledge on almost all things known to exist in the supernatural world. Although, when I was young, we called it something different." He steepled his fingers together in front of his chest. "Tell me, dear Allison, you wouldn't happen to know where this bestiary is at the moment, would you?" He pronounced the word as though it was foreign and part of an inside joke that only he and Adrianna could understand as he winked in her direction, which it most probably was.

"The Physiologus isn't for sale, Peter." Adrianna quickly interrupted before Allison's greedy desire to prove herself ruined more than it already had. "And even if it was, I would never let you of all people, have it."

"Now that name certainly rings a bell," Peter obliviously rambled on. "Physiologus." He pronounced it with reverence. "It seems you're the one I need to talk to if I want to get my hands on it, then." He realized.

"Good luck with that," Allison couldn't seem to help daring him. Although her voice managed to remain frosty and detached at first, her shoulders stiff in front of Adrianna's, it only took a moment for it to simmer and revealed how she truly felt. "I'll be damned if you take anything else from my family."

Her cousin launched forward and for one, blissful, terrifying moment, Adrianna thought about letting Allison fight Peter. Where she couldn't unleash her own horrifying version of justice, Allison appeared to have no qualms about doing so, herself.

And then, Adrianna found Peter's steely, infuriatingly arrogant gaze, and she knew that she couldn't permit her cousin to injure Peter or herself, while the werewolf was still useful to them.

Her hand clamped around Allison's arm like solid steel. Her legs tensed and her feet braced for the jarring pull that she received as Allison's momentum was suddenly halted.

"Let go of me!" Allison cried indignantly as she struggled to break free, inches away from sinking her stubby, chipped fingernails into Peter's intolerable grin. "He killed Kate! Don't you remember? Don't you care?" She shrilly demanded.

Adrianna twisted her hold over Allison to avoid her cousin's well-placed elbow, stepping around the various stomps and kicks that nearly collided with her shins on several occasions.

"Of course I care." Adrianna couldn't stop herself from bellowing, her face growing warm as she began to lose control over her manufactured calm. "Don't you ever forget that, no matter who she loved or didn't, she was my mother." Adrianna's voice strained and a vein tugged to the surface on her neck as she stared into her cousin's manic gaze for the first time since they'd fought each other. "Remember what that feels like?"

Allison grew silent, a sliver of light seeming to break through the ominous clouds hiding her conscious thoughts away from her furious, impulsive desires. "You're not alone in this." She pressed, ignoring the other prying eyes as she tried to siphon reason into her cousin's twisted mind. "You've never been the only one to lose people."

She remembered the first few days after she'd lost Kate. Adrianna had been a wreck, susceptible, more than ever, to Gerard's manipulations. At the time, it had been Scott and the others that had drawn back the curtain and showed her that there was more to living than just searching for revenge. That she was allowed to mourn for her mother.

Perhaps Allison needed that same reassurance. Perhaps all she really needed, was a friend; someone to tell her that they understood—that they had her back, no matter what.

But then, as Adrianna's message sunk in, Allison's reflective brown eyes hardened and sealed off.

"You'll never understand." Allison broke away from Adrianna, rubbing at her wrist balefully. "You betrayed your family—you destroyed our grandfather—and for what?" She demanded raspily, her accusing finger whirling around the room to point at Isaac Lahey, who'd been quietly standing beside Scott and Stiles since the moment they'd all piled into the veterinary clinic. "For a boy?"

There were a thousand things Adrianna could have said; things she wanted to say. But none of them would help Allison. It was clear to her now that Allison didn't want anything to do with her. She didn't want to be understood. She wanted to be the best, to achieve and surpass everyone's expectations of her, and the only way to do that—Adrianna knew from experience—was to separate yourself from your competition.

Unfortunately, Adrianna knew that she was her cousin's competition.

"Yes." She settled on saying instead, her tone clipped and just as final as her thoughts had settled out to be. "All of it for a boy."

But it wasn't the boy that Allison had accused. No, Isaac Lahey wasn't the reason she'd turned her back on everything she'd ever known, leaping into the unknown to follow a cause her heart didn't quite understand, even now.

"Are you in love with him? Is that what you think?" Allison caustically demanded, her lips curling in disgust even as she glanced over at Scott. "Well, I'll promise you this, love isn't all it's chalked up to be. You're better off without it. It makes you weak and vulnerable; it spreads like a cancer through you and poisons every part of you until there's nothing left but the utter fragility and weakness."

"Allison," Scott brokenly muttered, his words catching in his throat when she turned away from him.

"Stay out of this, Scott!" She rumbled thunderously, rounding on him as her messy, ink colored hair fell in front of her enraged features. "I told you to get out my way before, and I meant it."

"That's enough." Chris interceded, moving forward to grab hold of the arm Adrianna had used to hold Allison back and using it to pull her away from the group. "Control yourself. You're mother wouldn't want this." He insisted.

Allison frowned, pouting slightly as she remained on the side-lines with her father, but did not complain any more. Despite the fact that no one was telling her to elaborate further, Adrianna felt as though she needed to share the real reason why she'd abandoned Gerard.

Beyond his cruelty, her short-comings, the innocence she'd learned some werewolves still possessed, and the compassion she'd finally been able to embrace in small but very potent quantities, was one boy.

He had started it all.

One boy and one bite.

"I did it for Jackson Whittemore." Adrianna exclaimed as Scott took over her position near the map, tracing out the Kanima's possible routes through the city's heart. "And it had nothing to do with love." She went on to say as the others stopped talking to listen to her.

Adrianna was extremely aware of Lydia's curious presence across the room, catching snippets of their conversations as she tried to overcome her shock and fear. She was staring directly at her when Adrianna looked over her shoulder.

Their eyes connected, hazel on green.

"Jackson wasn't mine to love." She explained gently. "He was mine to protect."

Lydia nodded her head slightly, her eyes finally dry of tears even as she sniffled. Adrianna felt her insides unclench slightly as she understood that the divide between the girl she'd become friends with first, out of all of the others, had finally been breached and started to mend.

"I couldn't stand by and watch as Gerard killed another creature he didn't entirely understand." Adrianna found Allison's flickering gaze and held onto it. "Too many innocent, weak, harmless people have died because of our grandfather's quest for eternal life and power." She whispered. "I couldn't let Jackson be next."

Allison didn't contradict her, but she didn't apologize, either. There was still much work yet to be done on her older cousin. Still so much damage that had yet to be repaired. It would be a long time before they could look each other in the eyes and not find an ounce of hate or envy.

But when the time came, Adrianna swore that she would be there, just like Scott, Melissa, and even Lydia and Stiles had been there for her.

#-#-#-#-#

Isaac had been left reeling. He couldn't believe, as hard as he tried, that it hadn't been his name slipping past Adrianna's lips as she bared her heart to her cousin.

Everything had pointed towards it being him. He'd stood by her since the beginning. In a way, he'd always thought it had been her mercy towards him when they'd first met that had lit the match towards her rebellion.

But he'd been wrong.

In a dramatic, corny, devastatingly pathetic way, Isaac had been completely certain that he—and he alone—had been the one responsible for taming the wild beast that was Adrianna Argent.

Only, that honor seemed to belong to Jackson Whittemore, the spoiled rich brat he'd once called a next-door neighbor, who not once in the ten years they'd lived across from each other, called the cops on his father's abuse.

Even though he tried his very best to remain unemotional and stay helpful to Scott as he laid out the new plan, Isaac could feel the jealous anger eating away inside him as it seemed to fry his brain.

"Guys," Stiles abruptly told them, his eyes glued to the phone held tightly in both of his hands. "You've got to see this."

Frowning, Isaac and Scott traded confused glances before joining the small crowd surrounding Stiles to see what all the fuss was about. On the small screen, a typical news reporter at a desk read out grim headlines.

Just as Isaac sighed heavily, about to set aside Stile's hyperactive hoax, Adrianna's figure catching in the corner of his eyes like a gloomy shadow as she refused to congregate around the tiny piece of technology, the words that the salt and pepper haired reporter were saying became clear to him.

"And now, we go to our field reporter located in Beacon Hills, California." The middle-aged man intoned seriously. "Tamara Jones at the heart of the mayhem, for you. Tamara, tell us what you see." He asked as a live feed appeared on the side of the screen.

Isaac held his breath as a picture of a very familiar street came into focus, the camera wobbling slightly as lamps flickered overhead and a blonde woman crouched behind a parked van.

"Are we still rolling?" The woman shrilly questioned, glancing into the camera before creeping along the van's side to peek out from behind it.

"Yeah," A body-less voice informed the woman as the camera was re-positioned again, almost as though the man holding the camera had stood up. "We're on."

"Okay," The reporter Isaac remembered was called Tamara, muttered to herself, straightening her suit jacket before lifting herself off her knees, moving several feet away from the safety of the van. "James, I don't know if you're getting this but I'm here. We're, uh, just outside the county's sheriff department." She supplied nervously, craning her neck to look behind herself before continuing.

"Something's happening here. There's some kind of terror attack." Tamara pressed a hand to the side of her head and Isaac noticed a wire snaking past her neck into her ear. "Um, so far there have been several explosions and quakes. The path of destruction seems to be coming from outside the city's limits, but at the moment, we don't have an exact source." She listed carefully, in a trained, precise manner.

"Witnesses that I've spoken to claim to," Here, the reporter stuttered, her brows pinching as she whispered something unintelligible to the man holding the camera. "Well, they seem to think that some sort of animal is causing this." She finished uncertainly.

"An animal?" The desk reporter on the other half of the screen wondered, pushing his glasses further up onto his nose as he appeared confused. "Can you be any more specific?"

"Not really, James." Tamara replied quickly. "A hazy cloud of ashes and fog seems to have descended over much of the city. Several old buildings have collapsed as a result of the tremors. No one can get a clear look at the thing."

Isaac's heart jumped in his throat as an ear-piercing shriek echoed through the phone, vibrating all the way to his bones. "Is this live?" He couldn't help asking Stiles, who simply nodded in response.

Looking past the reporter, Isaac could see no fog or ashes. The station was in clear view, just as he could clearly make out the giant, winged dragon racing past in a blur of shiny scales as it slammed into the sheriff's station and then flew out the other side.

The crash was heart-stopping. Something started to ring in Isaac's ears as he watched the brick building collapse in on itself, frightened and pain-filled screams echoed through the feed.

He hardly noticed when the screen went black.

"Oh my god." Isaac distantly heard Scott say, a hand pressed to his temples as he stepped away.

"We have to stop that thing," Derek realized for all of them. "Before it's too late."

"Stop it?" Lydia squeaked. "What the hell is it?"

"Screw this," Peter replied definitively as he moved to walk away. "I'm leaving."

"If we work together," Chris reminded them all, trying to raise his voice above the panicked, clamorous shouting. "We can save everybody. We still have a chance."

"A chance?" Allison scoffed. "We don't have a chance in hell."

"Watch your language." Chris quickly chastised her, only for Allison to roll her eyes and shake her head.

"Yeah," She mumbled beneath her breath. "Whatever."

"Now, if everyone could just settle down," Deaton attempted to bring order back into the chaotic frenzy. "We can deal with this like civilized people; make a plan to stop Jackson and minimize casualties." But no matter how loudly the dark-skinned vet shouted, no one listened to him.

Isaac felt his palms sweating as nervous anticipation clenched his heart. He didn't know what to do. He looked to Scott, as he'd been doing more and more recently, but the shaggy-haired boy that had served as a make-shift leader up until then, appeared just as confused and devastated as everyone else.

"Alright, that's enough." A clear, slightly patronizing voice echoed throughout the room, drawing Isaac's attention over to where Adrianna had slammed her hand into the metal table, a fist-sized dent left behind as she stretched out her fingers across the slightly crumbled map. "Everyone, shut up!" She roared when some of the chatter continued.

All at once, silence echoed, loud and strange on Isaac's ears, throughout the room. Scott and Chris looked embarrassed—much the way Isaac imagined he did, too—while Allison, Derek, and Peter simply pushed their anger and frustration beneath the surface so that all of their gazes sizzled when they landed on Adrianna.

Unsurprisingly, the huntress that meant much more than she should have to Isaac, didn't flinch.

"Good, that's much better." She quietly continued, her tone still dripping with deprecating amusement as she dragged her long, chipped nails across the stainless steel surface of the table. "Now that we've all calmed down a little bit, let's set aside the all-consuming terror and focus on our goal." Adrianna instructed calmly.

Reaching into her pocket, Adrianna produced a slim, blue USB chip, and held it out between her fingers. "Panicking, while I can assure you that I'm aware of how difficult it is to deny, will not help us whatsoever in this moment." She went on to say, her heels clacking across the tile floors as she slowly carved out a space in the midst of the barely restrained crowd. "Planning is what we should be doing. Not tearing into each other like a pack of rabid wolves—" Adrianna smiled, her canines shining sharply in the fluorescent lighting. "Pun intended."

Isaac shuffled where he stood, licking his lips uncomfortably as he gauged the other's reactions. Most of them were listening, albeit grudgingly (except for Allison), but Deaton seemed to have an especially keen interest in her speech. He looked at her like he was studying her. It set a muscle in Isaac's jaw to twitching before he remembered that he wasn't supposed to care.

"What exactly do you suggest?" The vet questioned apathetically, his raised eyebrow the only sign of his actual intrigue. "To create a plan we need information. Is this something you can provide us with?" He wondered, almost as if he was baiting her.

Adrianna grinned, her eyelids slanting so that she looked more cat-like than ever, although Isaac knew that if she was any kind of feline, she was definitely a lion. "You could say that, doc." Adrianna casually replied, the computer chip sliding between her fingers in much the same way as she often twirled her knives, dipping and twisting.

"This here, as I'm sure many of you already know, is my family's Physiologus." Adrianna informed them proudly. "It was written in archaic Latin since the very first Argent began hunting the supernatural, which means that it's over two centuries old." She held out the chip for all of them to see. "Inside this book, is all the information on the Kanima that you'll ever need."

"Only we can't read it," Derek roughly interrupted her, his arms crossed over his chest as a frown pulled down his lips. "And I'm guessing that you can." He added caustically.

"I'm not the only one that can read archaic Latin, you know." Adrianna said as she crossed one foot in front of the other and leaned against the table. Her stare slid across the room, landing on Lydia, who was tucked away in a corner looking ten times more miserable than he'd ever seen her before.

"Who can and can't read it is beside the point." Peter reminded them sternly as Lydia hesitantly looked up to meet their gazes. "What we really want to know, is whether we can trust Adrianna to lead us into this battle."

Isaac felt sick to his stomach. He'd almost forgotten that the monster he'd seen in the news report wasn't just the product of very good, very expensive movie effects. It was real and he—he—would have to help Scott and the others fight it.

"Haven't I already proved that I'm not going to switch sides?" Adrianna contested sharply. "For all the god's sakes, I even turned my back on my own family so that justice could be served. Don't you think that if I was going to betray you, I'd have done it by now?" She asked them.

But even still, Isaac wasn't convinced. After all, he'd thought he'd known everything about her, until only a few moments ago when she'd turned his world upside down. Perhaps Adrianna had even more secrets, buried just beneath the surface where no one else could see them.

"It's true, you've fought on our side and your worth in battle—particularly against the Kanima—seems to be vital." Peter agreed, his tone sympathetic. "But how can we trust that you'll have our backs, when most of us don't even know what you are or where you came from?"

He could tell that it was a trick. Peter was trying his very best to subtly tear Adrianna apart, piece by piece. And yet, Isaac couldn't help the truth that rung in each of the older man's words. Peter might have been a psychopathic murderer, but at the moment, he seemed to be the only one willing to voice the doubts that still swirled around Adrianna Argent.

"You know what I am, don't you?" Adrianna's voice cracked, sounding raspy and raw, although her posture never faltered; strong and unreadable as ever. "You've been hinting it since the moment you slithered out of whatever hole you've been hiding in, deep down in Tartarus." She walked forward so that there was only a small distance between her and Peter.

Isaac could smell her revulsion, her hatred and her anger. Beneath that, he thought he caught the distinct metallic tang of fear, hidden so deeply that Isaac could nearly convince himself that he hadn't noticed it, at all.

"I have my theories," Peter affirmed, his lips quirking slyly, as though he was enjoying finally poking beneath Adrianna's unusually thick skin. "And none of them bode well for you, darling."

Adrianna's spine grew rigid. Isaac couldn't see her face, but he imagined that her expression mirrored storm clouds, strikes of lightning flashing through every once in a while as her fists clenched by her sides.

"Go on, then." She goaded her mother's murderer and Isaac held his breath. "Tell them. Tell them everything that you think you know. See if I care."

Scott glanced over at him, equal worry in his stare as they both silently agreed to shuffle forward, just in case they needed to separate the huntress and the werewolf who were both spoiling for a fight; for a chance to even the scores.

"Oh, I'd like to." Peter taunted, his hand snapping outwards in the blink of an eye and roughly grabbing onto Adrianna's jaw. "Believe me, I would. I'd love to see the way that these people—you're friends—look at you when they learn the haunting truth of you." Deep in his throat, Isaac released a warning growl as he felt his eyes glowing hot.

Peter only laughed, ignoring the way that Adrianna's shoulders rose as she bristled hatefully, her defenses beginning to crumble as her breathing hitched. Leaning in closer to her until their noses nearly touched and Isaac felt as though his blood had turned to gasoline and lit on fire, Peter whispered his next words quietly, like they were only meant for Adrianna to hear.

"But where would be the fun in that?"

And all at once, Isaac's veins froze over as a shiver jostled his spine and numbed his thoughts.

Pushing her away, Peter chuckled to himself as Adrianna turned away from him, her footsteps faltering as she tried to distance herself from him. On instinct alone, Isaac reached out to steady her, his hands wrapping around her frigid biceps.

When she didn't shy away, her snow white face lifting up to stare at him, her green eyes hollow pits to a place he never wanted to glimpse again, Isaac knew that all he'd ever feared was true. Peter knew what she was, perhaps he even knew more than that, and whatever the real story was, Isaac could be certain of one thing.

It wasn't a nice one.

The silence was deafening. Each breath, measured, calculated, and totally erratic, seemed to echo on forever as every eye in the room stared at the two of them, waiting for Adrianna's reaction; for what she would say to defend herself.

But, in a fashion that was so unlike her, Isaac couldn't believe the action had even come out of her brain, Adrianna held tightly to Isaac's hand and faced the others, her visage expressing more unguarded emotion than he'd ever seen her permit.

"You don't have to trust me," She begun shakily, her voice slowly growing in strength. "And you can't expect me to share all of my secrets with you, when I've only known you for a short while." Adrianna took a deep breath before continuing. "But tonight, you won't have to."

Isaac frowned as Adrianna moved away from him, her spare hand stretching out to splay across Scott's shoulder. "I won't be the one leading you in this battle." She told them with certainty, leaving no room for debate. "Scott McCall will be."

She held out the bestiary for Scott to take, her lips pursed tightly as the fingers in Isaac's grasp seemed to turn to ice. "I'm not a leader," She explained, her voice straining in places. "I'm a soldier."

"I'll follow you, Scott." Adrianna assured as Scott stared down at the USB in his palm with equal parts wonderment and trepidation. "We all will." She amended, staring out at the assembled war party.

Three hunters, four werewolves, and a veterinarian, Isaac counted off as he braced himself for the struggle they would be throwing themselves into. What could possibly go wrong?

"Okay." Scott muttered uncertainly, closing his fingers around the chip in a reassuring fist. "First thing's first," He began with more confidence. "We're going to need a computer."

In a way, Isaac was glad that Adrianna had elected to stay in the background and allow Scott to take over. As much as he wanted to trust her, his head was telling him that she'd lied one too many times for that to be possible.

He'd once been certain about what he felt for her.

Now, Isaac could only focus on surviving the night.

The rest, he was sure, would come later.

#-#-#-#-#

Deaton watched as the teenagers came together to create a plan. He hadn't been expecting Adrianna to relinquish the perfect chance to prove her capabilities as a leader, but then, it wouldn't have been the first time an Argent surprised him.

Standing back, Deaton felt the edges of his lips rising ever so slightly as he looked between Chris Argent, Derek Hale, Scott McCall, and Stiles Stilinski. All of them were working together seamlessly, planning what could possibly be each of their funerals. If it hadn't been so disturbing, stabbing an ice cold dagger of fear directly into his heart, Deaton would have been prouder than ever.

But as it was, he couldn't bask in the kid's accomplishments.

Turning around, Peter Hale—who was standing further away from the group, appearing as though he was paying absolutely no attention while Deaton was certain that he'd caught every word—pushed his way towards Deaton at a pace that wouldn't arouse attention or suspicion from many of the others, but which would allow him to intercept Alan before he had the chance to slip away.

"We need to talk." The eldest Hale informed him sternly, glancing over his shoulder as his nephew, Derek, along with the youngest huntress among them, both looked up to watch the exchange warily.

Deaton allowed a polite smile to creep upon his lips. "What about?" He wondered, forcing his posture to remain relaxed no matter how much his spine wanted to straighten rigidly and his fists clench tightly. Alan knew what Peter Hale was capable of. He wasn't going to give the man an excuse to murder him, too, although he doubted the Hale would do so after everything they'd been through.

Still, he didn't want to take any chances.

Peter's head tipped back as an ironic exhale bubbled past his lips. "About the mistake these children are making and how we're going to fix it before they seriously screw up." He lowly stated, looking directly into Alan's own brown eyes with a deadly seriousness that didn't match the joking skew of his lips and the impish dimple that dented his cheek.

"I see." Deaton hummed thoughtfully, nodding his head. "We can talk in the waiting room." He gestured towards the exit of the large laboratory and surgery hall with his arm as casually as he could. "It's much more private." He amended, darting his stare out towards the relatively undisturbed group who were fussing over the stacks of charts and maps depicting Beacon Hills.

"Good," Peter's brow rose as he looked out at the others, Derek holding his gaze suspiciously. "Lead the way." He finished, turning back around just as his nephew extricated himself from the group and made his way over to them.

"It's right this way," Alan informed Peter, beginning to walk towards the doorway as Derek trailed behind them. "Follow me."

As he exited the spacious back rooms of his veterinary clinic, Deaton's eye caught on Scott McCall, who was disputing a tactic with Chris and making some surprisingly thoughtful suggestions and critiques. Alan sighed, the guilt already gnawing away at his gut even as he had yet to betray his young friend.

"Close the door." Peter demanded once all three of them were inside the lobby. Although Derek hadn't necessarily been invited, Peter didn't seem overly bothered by his nephew's presence.

If they had been about to discuss anything else, Alan wouldn't have acquiesced so easily. But things weren't that easy and what they were about to talk about, even Deaton could see, would not settle well on the ears of the young werewolves and hunters turned heroes.

Just before Deaton could slide the door shut, a figure darted through the half-closed space. His hand tightened over the door-knob as he recognized Adrianna Argent's sharp, jade-like eyes cutting into him as she broke yet another unspoken rule of nature by pressing her icy fingers over his and shutting the door those final few inches for it to click in place.

"Alright," Peter intoned rather dramatically, as most Hales seemed to like doing. "Let's get started."

Peter's back was turned so Deaton was almost certain that he wasn't aware of their newest addition. Derek, however, pale green eyes nearly the colour of murky bogs and swirling with just as much uncertainty, most definitely had noticed Adrianna's presence.

He crossed his arms in front of his chest, the muscles bulging and tense as he glared at the huntress heatedly. It wasn't clear to Deaton what the younger Hale was feeling. There was bitterness and anger in his gaze, like there always seemed to be lately, but there was also something hidden beneath all of that. Something Alan could almost identify as interest and perhaps a tiny shred of respect.

It seemed Adrianna had seen it too, as she licked her chapped lips, hesitantly meeting Derek's burning stare with a rather open, much friendlier version of her own. And then, just as Alan wondered if it was even possible for Derek and Kate's daughter to make amends after everything that had passed between them, Derek had to open his mouth.

"What the hell is she doing here?" He rumbled deep in his chest, full of hostility and malice. "She's a f—freaking hunter," Derek broke off, clearing his throat as Deaton's sharp glare refused to diminish. "Haven't we already established how untrustworthy she is?"

"Uh, she is right here, in case you hadn't noticed." Adrianna sarcastically pointed at her own chest, braving Derek's attack with a mere pinch of her brow and the narrowing of her once kind stare into something that chilled the air between them. "And I'm getting very tired of defending myself against a pointless argument that I'm never gonna win."

"Don't worry," Derek nearly snarled, his lips inching up above his canines with each word. "I noticed."

"You did?" Adrianna incredulously countered, her hands migrating to her hips as her heeled boots shuffled over the tile floors, almost as though she wanted to rush towards Derek and battle out their differences, but had seen how pointless the action would be and decided against it at the last minute. "Because, from the way I have to keep repeating myself over and over again, I'd have thought that you paid about zero percent attention to anything I've had to say in my own defense."

"Please?" Derek demanded roughly. "You're like a broken record. Everyone already knows what you've done to prove yourself, they just don't care." He bluntly stated. "You've got blood on your hands, Addy; you're tainted for life now." Derek mocked relentlessly.

Something changed in Adrianna's eyes as the unfamiliar nickname rolled off of Derek's lips and crackled like lightning between them. Her fists clenched and the temperature seemed to plummet in the room until Deaton was left watching his own cloudy exhale expand in the frigid air before him.

"Don't—ever—call me that again." She dangerously told Derek, a strange sort of humming filling the room.

Biting the inside of his cheek, Deaton realized that it was about time that someone shook some sense into the two of them, but before he could do so himself, Peter beat him to the task.

"Alright, that's enough flirting from both of you," He teased them, although, when Deaton thought back on it, he wondered if it wasn't partly true. "Adrianna, you're welcome to join us." Peter declared with startling sincerity as he met her slightly less angry stare head-on. "And Derek, you should know better than to provoke Kate's daughter, of all people. We don't want history repeating itself, do we?" He asked his nephew pointedly.

Derek stared at the ground, huffing out frustrated air from his nostrils. Adrianna nodded in agreement to Peter's words, although she refused to meet his glittering stare. Alan couldn't say he blamed her. He'd known Peter for a very long time, long enough to know that whenever he helped, it wasn't for no reason and there was always a price.

"Now that that's sorted out," Peter continued pleasantly, something sinister lurking in his gaze as it flittered over Deaton, never landing in place. "How about we get down to business and talk about what we're all really here for?"

There was a stretch of silence that permitted Deaton to hear his own heart thumping in his ears. Everyone knew the answer to Peter's question, but no one seemed to want to say the words out loud, first.

Adrianna took the plunge a moment later, stepping forward and standing tall as she finally met Peter's troublingly intrigued gaze. "I'm going to kill Jackson Whittemore," She informed them offhandedly. "And I'm here to ask for your help."

He'd known it would have to be said eventually, but Deaton had not been prepared to hear it the way that Adrianna uttered it. Her face was clear of emotion, her eyes calculating but otherwise blank. Somewhere deep inside, Deaton knew it had to hurt, but he couldn't tell where.

"Well," Peter drawled lazily, the heart-aching quiet finally shattering away. "Now that it's out in the open, I'd like to agree with you, Adrianna." He nodded in the young girl's direction in a way that should have been respectful, but only came off as confrontational. "Our friends in the other room seem to be under the impression that Jackson is still trapped inside the Kanima somehow." Peter nodded his head towards the closed door for added emphasis as he continued.

"Since we're all here, it's safe to assume that the rest of us know better." He threaded his fingers in front of his chest thoughtfully. "So, I guess the only question left to ask, is how?"

"How are we gonna do this?" Derek finished for his uncle, his expression twisting with discomfort and grudging acceptance of the task that lay ahead of them. "How do we kill him when Scott wants to save him?"

A part of Deaton wanted to argue. He wanted to point out that, while Scott's goals were overly idealistic and made an already dangerous mission deadly, they were still good goals and plans. Jackson still deserved to be saved.

But he knew, just as well as he knew that werewolves could be killed with wolf'sbane and silver, that they were already far past that point.

So he kept his mouth shut and listened to what the wiser, tougher, perhaps meaner and deadlier allies in Scott's team had to say.

"We can use the hunting tactics that my family implements against a pack of werewolves." Adrianna suggested, her hand absently tracing over a red, irritated cut on her cheek. "Lure them to a place you know that you have the advantage—like a valley or cliff-face—corner them, and then take them out one by one."

"It's a good idea," Alan supplied, rubbing a hand over his chin as he remembered what the Alpha-Kanima had looked like over the news channel and how it had been carefully sketched into the Argent's bestiary. "The only thing we have to worry about is whether a plan designed to play on a wolf pack's weaknesses, will still work against the creature Jackson has become."

"As far as I can tell," Peter tuned in. "The Alpha-Kanima doesn't have any pack instincts. It's a solitary predator that evolves from it's beta shape following an emotional or physiological trigger of some kind."

"That's not entirely true," Adrianna was quick to point out. "While the Kanima is known to be solitary in it's beta shape, seeking a master instead of a pack, the Alpha form literally becomes it's own master. What happened to Matt, it wasn't the scales trying to balance themselves out, it was the Kanima reacting to the rules it was forced to break by murdering innocents and creating a second Kanima—a beta—for which it's Alpha form could control." She explained rapidly, her eyes shining excitedly even as Peter and Derek glanced at each other worriedly.

"Theoretically," She continued just as enthusiastically. "The Alpha-Kanima has all of the ingrained instincts it needs—protective, defensive, and perhaps even procreative—for the same strategies to apply."

"Yeah," Derek lifted his finger and shook it as his eyes narrowed. "But our only problem is that Matt never actually turned into a second Kanima. Without the Alpha's beta, assuming that's what it really wanted in the first place, there will be no way to lure it into a trap to begin with. We have nothing it wants."

"No, that's not right." Peter suddenly seemed to understand, stepping forward and placing a heavy hand over Derek's shoulder as he grinned at Adrianna savagely, almost as though he was seeing her through a new light. "We do have something that it wants—" He left his sentence to hang, expecting Adrianna to finish it.

Although she grimaced slightly, Adrianna grudgingly did so. "We have Lydia."

Her eyes connected with Deaton's, earnest and concerned. He saw then, how hard it was going to be for her. Jaw grinding taut, lips pressed into a thin line, and veins standing out across her stiff neck, it was clear to Alan that she wanted to save Jackson just as much as Scott did, perhaps even more so, but years of training and fighting monsters just like the Alpha-Kanima had taught her when even the most sincere, truly good dreams, were already unattainable.

"Scott's not going to like this." Deaton reminded her, even though he was sure she already knew.

"What Scott doesn't know, won't hurt him." Adrianna replied, her tone informing Deaton that her mind had already been made up for some time about this. "He wants to save Jackson so badly, he's blinded himself to the sacrifices such an unlikely task will cost him."

Peter was nodding his head along to her words. "You know," He amusedly stated. "You're a lot more like your mother than I realized. Cold-heartedly euthanizing a danger to this town and many others is one thing, but lying to Scott about it and pretending to go along with their plan, when you really have your own in the works;" Peter whistled. "That's a new level of cruel."

Derek frowned at his uncle's words but didn't protest. Deaton waited to see Adrianna's reaction. He wanted to know if she could learn from her mistakes, or if—as Peter had so wisely stated—history was fated to repeat itself.

"It's what needs to be done." She stared levelly into Peter's eyes, her shoulders curling in as though she was bearing the weight of the world. "I don't enjoy it, in fact, I hate it. But if we're the only ones who can stand up and do this, then what choice do I have?" Shaking her head, Adrianna looked away from Peter, focusing on a single point across from her on the white-washed walls. "If there's one thing I know, it's that a monster like Jackson can't be allowed to continue living so long as the death toll keeps rising."

"So what?" Peter laughed bitterly. "You think you're being a hero? You think this is some kind of magnanimous gesture?" Derek's hand reached out and clamped across his uncle's forearm, silencing him mid-rant.

"Don't make this any harder than it has to be, Peter." Derek whispered lowly, his chin tilted towards his uncle so that half of his expression was hidden away. "You're the only one that's going to enjoy this. For the rest of us, it's going to be grueling, but we're the only ones that can do it."

He looked up at that, right into Deaton's sympathetic stare.

"We're the killers." He realized.

They were the darkest of the light. They were the ones who'd taken lives and shed the blood of their enemies without a second thought. They were the ones that didn't have to be afraid of dirtying their already stained hands.

Peter Hale had the most experience with it. Deaton knew that it had become a game to the older werewolf. Lives no longer mattered, unless they were his own. But even this would be difficult for him—to know that inside the Kanima, buried beneath the layers of the reptilian creature, was a human boy. It would be the closest that the man had come to a mercy killing.

Derek Hale was angry and bitter. His eyes before becoming an Alpha were blue, making him even guiltier than Peter was, in a way. An innocent life had been taken by his arms and his hands and it still weighed heavily on his conscious. Deaton could only hope that it wouldn't interfere with the duty they and they alone would have to carry out.

Adrianna Argent was quite possibly the worst of them all. Deaton didn't want to guess at how many werewolves she'd killed and would kill over the course of her life as a prolific huntress. There was something about her; death clung to her every pore, following her wherever she went. It was inescapable for her. It seemed that everyone she cared for, surely died.

Her story had been written down in blood and ashes—all of theirs had been—and tonight, they would be intertwined once more; Hale and Argent. It reminded Alan of a different night filled with heartbreak, loss, and so much death. In the midst of it all, though, there had been a spark of hope...of life.

It was Deaton's one wish that the very same hope would be present among them as they ended Jackson Whittemore's dreadfully short life.

"Do we have an agreement?" He questioned the trio heavily. This was the part about his job that he hated most. It was the reason he'd gone into retirement in the first place.

To ask something like this of them, of three people who had already lost far too much, was simply unforgivable. But it had to be done. Not for him. Not for them. Not even for Jackson.

For the people they were encharged to protect. For the humans who couldn't fathom the world they lived in; who thought monsters were frightening stories told to keep them in bed as children and not the warnings they truly were.

Without them, Beacon Hills wouldn't survive the night.

As their eyes met—shades of clouded green and blue—all three crooked champions, it was apparent to Deaton what their answers would be, even before they spoke them out loud.

Steel straightened their bones, iron pulled their muscles taut, silver sealed their wounds, bronze coated their hearts, and hot, slippery gold slid across their minds and shut off whatever doubts they carried underneath the walls they'd each built.

"Let's do this." Peter said for all of them.

"Okay, then." Derek, Adrianna, and Peter repeated one after the other. It was a quiet roar, a dull war-cry.

As Deaton led the way back to the others, he couldn't help thinking that—no matter what the benefits were—the cost was once again far too high for the brave souls risking their morals and integrity on a cause they might not have even believed in, a moment ago.

But this was the way of things. Heartbreaking compromises had to be made.

And this...this sacrifice...it was only the beginning.

#-#-#-#-#

Stiles' eyes remained fixed on the closed door, the image of the four figures walking past the open doorway with light steps and careful glances burned into his retinas even as he forced himself to blink and the clean, white wooden door came back into focus.

Peter and Derek had followed Deaton through the doorway, but, after everything that had transpired, Stiles had never expected to see Adrianna skirt the edge of the room and duck through the door behind them.

"Stiles," Scott harshly whispered from beside him, his brows furrowing as his finger remained glued on a point which marked the recently destroyed Sheriff's station. "Are you okay? Did you catch anything I just said?" His unevenly-jawed friend wondered.

Shaking his head, Stiles forced himself to set aside the two Hale's and one Argent's strange behavior as he felt guilt bubble in his stomach. "Yeah," He quickly replied, scratching at his eyebrow as he hoped desperately that Scott didn't notice his obvious lie. "I got it."

As ever, Scott could be counted on to remain positive and optimistic. He bought Stiles' explanation in a heartbeat. "Okay," He nodded his head, turning his gaze away from Stiles and back onto the map where stones, what appeared to be sewing pins, and marker-stained lines were scattered across the blueprint of Beacon Hills. "So what do you think?" Scott pressed uncertainly.

Pressing his lips together, Stiles realized that he could no longer get away with lying at the same moment that Chris and Allison did. "About...?" He dragged out, the word feeling slippery and acidic on his tongue.

Scott glanced back at him incredulously, shaking his head and narrowing his eyes in a 'what the hell?' gesture. Chris Argent placed a palm to his forehead, sighing tiredly. Allison, who Stiles was beginning to see had a lot more in common with her cousin than she was undoubtedly comfortable with, took it upon herself to angrily fill him in on what he'd missed.

"We intercept the Kanima here," She stabbed a finger at the map where the Kanima's last known location was, in the near vicinity of the Sheriff's station. "I help Lydia to distract the target and, assuming she's successful, we make our way around the city's center, into the Animal Preserve." Her fingernail had dirt caked beneath it along with crimson blood as she dragged her pointer finger in a visual display of what she'd just told him, jabbing one last time at the paper beneath her as she stopped at the green-colored preserve.

"And what happens after that?" Stiles questioned, his stare darting to the edge of the room where Lydia was sitting down quietly, her form shrouded in darkness. "If the Kanima wants to kill Lydia, won't she still be in danger?"

"Yes," Chris agreed sternly, crossing his arms over his chest as he followed Stiles' line of sight and made eye-contact with a reluctant Lydia. "But if our assumptions are right and Lydia—sharing a strong emotional connection to Jackson's human form—is the only one that has any hope of forcing his humanity to resurface, isn't it worth the risk?" He asked the strawberry blonde.

Lydia stood on shaking legs but refused any help as she made her way towards the group, leaning against the metal operating table and analyzing the map intelligently. "So you're going to use me as bait?" She stated more than asked a few, tense moments later.

Stiles swallowed down the urge to argue and convince Lydia that the plan was too dangerous, roughly. The unspoken words nearly choked him, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut, contrary to popular belief.

"Uh," Scott scratched his shaggy head, his eyes flittering around the room before landing on Lydia with much difficulty. "You said you wanted to help and this is the safest way." He avoided the question. "The rest of us will have your back and you'll be with Stiles the whole time."

A noise of complaint gurgled past Stiles' throat as he shook his head at Scott in denial. He wanted no part in the orchestrated endangering of Lydia Martin. If he could help it, he wasn't even going to watch.

"But I'm still bait." Lydia perceived smartly, ignoring Stiles' outburst.

Scott cleared his throat nervously as he shuffled his feet. "Basically, yeah." He admitted sheepishly.

Instead of becoming frightened and backing away, like everyone secretly expected her to, Lydia stood taller and fearlessly met each of their guilty, embarrassed, or encouraging stares. "What do I have to do?" Lydia uttered.

The corner of Allison's lips rose in a near-smile, the most emotion he'd seen from her—other than rage and frustration—since before her mother had died. "Find a way to catch his attention and keep it. If you can't do this, people are going to die." She unnecessarily added.

Lydia frowned but accepted her friend's words silently even as her skin paled a few shades, if that was even possible. "What happens after we reach the preserve, assuming everything goes to plan?"

"Which it hardly ever does." Stiles chimed in as his palms began to sweat just thinking about using the girl he'd been in love with for nearly six years of his life, as bait for an immense dragon creature capable of tearing her in half.

Scott pointedly ignored him as he clenched his fist and then flattened it against the paper-covered table. "We fight him where no one but us can get hurt," He told Lydia, who was blinking hard to try and clear away more tears before they could fall.

Blood began to seep into the map from where Scott had ostensibly cut his palm with his own claws. Lydia watched the puddle grow, her stare transfixed and showing none of the panic that Stiles was feeling.

"We take him to the edge," Scott voiced carefully, pressing his palm down harder over the map and pushing out even more blood. "To the point where he's an inch away from death."

"And then?" Lydia shakily demanded, her chin lifting as she met eyes with Scott.

Scott lifted his hand off of the ruined section of map, gingerly holding it out for everyone to see. "And then, before he has a chance to heal, while his mental defenses are down and all he's worried about is surviving the night," He intoned as the four stab wounds encircling his palm, which he'd inflicted with his own claws, began to close. "We remind him of his humanity and hope that it's enough for him to defeat the Kanima from there."

The overhead florescent lights buzzed as silence filled the room. Ordinarily, Stiles would have pointed out the many holes in Scott's vague plan. But now, with the hundreds of thousands of lives in Beacon Hills depending on them, he couldn't bring himself to shoot down the only ray of hope they had left.

"What if it's not enough?" Chris was the first to speak and he seemed just as pained by the criticism as Stiles felt, but everyone knew it had to be said.

"It'll be enough." A firm voice echoed from the now open doorway as Adrianna re-entered the room. Her heels clacked against the cement floors, distracting from Deaton, Peter, and Derek's forms trailing behind her, disappearing into the shadows of the room and expertly weaving back into the group as though they'd never left.

"Besides," Adrianna grinned like the Cheshire cat but there was something haunting in her gaze that unsettled Stiles as she reached out and took hold of Scott's hand. "I've still got a few cards up my sleeve." She ominously hinted.

Veins as black as coal raised along her skin, trailing across her fingers and spreading through the points of contact she maintained with Scott's hand to thread through the werewolf's flesh.

Before his eyes, Stiles watched as the four claw-holes in Scott's hand, which he'd seen to be nearly closed, pulled open again until they were even wider than they'd first been.

"So you're not human, either?" Lydia meekly questioned as Adrianna's silent suggestion sank into each of their thoughts.

Green eyes shining brightly in the white light, Adrianna shrugged slightly as she pulled away from a wincing Scott and allowed him to cradle his bleeding palm as the skin healed much slower than it had the first time.

"That's a long story." She assured Lydia, placing both her hands against the map and leaning over it, effectively halting the conversation right there.

Stiles licked his lips, an inappropriate laugh threatening to break free. "I knew it." He whispered to himself, keeping the overwhelming fear at bay by forcing his mind into constant motion.

#-#-#-#-#

Lydia was afraid.

In fact, she'd never been more afraid in her life.

But the fear, lurking in the back of her mind and forcing her fingers to shake uncontrollably, wasn't the thing that made it hardest to breath. No, it was powerful, but not that strong; at least, not yet.

Jackson's dead body kept flashing through her memory, soft and warm, but limp, so terrifyingly limp, as he'd fallen into her arms. Those words she'd whispered into his ear so desperately; she was ashamed to realize that she'd never said them before to him.

"I do," Lydia repeated, just to make sure that she'd actually said it out loud and it hadn't all been a hallucination—much like the nightmarish images she'd seen when Peter had convinced her to help revive him. "I do still love you."

Which meant that everyone knew how she had really felt about Jackson, and how she still felt. Lydia ordinarily wouldn't have had a problem with it, only now that she'd seen Jackson mutate into a giant serpent with wings, there was no way that she could go back on her words. There was no way she could deny being in love with Jackson, who—in a very real, very scary way—was not the human she'd taken him for being.

But then, a tiny, doubt-filling voice whispered in her mind, neither am I.

Scott's words to her as he'd explained the plan drifted back into her head, echoing and rippling shivers up her spine. As if what had happened wasn't bad enough, already, to top it all off, Lydia would have to be the one that the myriad group of self-proclaimed heroes used to draw Jackson away from his rampage on Beacon Hills, and into the forest preserve, where they could fight and save him without any additional casualties.

But even though they had a plan, and she'd been assured so many times she'd lost count that her part was—by far—one of the safest among the attack, Lydia couldn't shake the feeling that an enormous load of hurt was about to be dumped on her heart. And the frightening part, was that she wasn't sure if she could take it.

"How are you doing?" A familiar voice abruptly questioned as Adrianna effortlessly snuck up on Lydia, taking the empty seat beside her in the lobby. "You looked a little troubled; I thought you might need some support after everything that's happened tonight." She added as Lydia's stiffly curled lips no doubt revealed her internal struggle.

"Yeah," Lydia pressed a hand to her forehead, dragging her index finger between her pinched brows and smoothing away the crinkling skin before she had a chance to develop wrinkles at her age. She couldn't even bring herself to think about the new information she'd recently learned about Adrianna, shoving it to the back of her mind for later processing. "I guess I could."

Her heart wasn't in the conversation and it was more than a little disturbing that Adrianna could so easily tell. Normally, Lydia was more careful about hiding her inner thoughts and feelings. It was how she'd managed to go on so long with most of her school believing that she was just another dumb, popular girl. "How much have Scott and Stiles filled you in on?" Adrianna suavely changed the subject and the transfer was so natural, it was as though they'd always been talking about that.

"Not much," Lydia conceded, the air finally releasing from her lungs in a heavy exhale. "Most of it, I'd already figured out or been told by Peter. The rest—" Lydia shook her head incredulously, basking in the strangeness of the moment as an amused smile quirked her lips. "The rest sounds so crazy, I know it has to be real. No one, not even Stiles and Scott, could make something like that up."

"I'm surprised you're not freaking out yet," Adrianna commented as she idly adjusted a strap on the leather corset she was wearing; most likely in preparation for the battle to come. "Werewolves, Kanimas, hunters, humans, and much more. All of it in one night. You've sure got a sturdy head on your shoulders."

"Yes I do." Lydia tried to confidently reply, but her voice cracked at the end and, as her eyes filled with salty tears once more, she found that being strong was a hell of a lot harder than she'd been making it out to be.

Sniffling, Lydia pressed a hand over her mouth to stifle the sobs that wanted to bubble past her lips. "No," She recanted heavily, shaking her head and dislodging several tears from the rim of her eyelids. "No, I'm not taking this well, at all."

Heaving in a large breath between the hiccup-like tremors that wracked her small frame, Lydia desperately wiped under her eyes, further smudging the blackened remains of her makeup, as she tried to puzzle herself back together before everyone realized what a mess she was.

"It's okay," Adrianna assured her hesitantly, her voice raspy and calming. "No amount of knowledge or conviction can prepare you to learn the truth, when you've been fed the lies your whole life." She shared sympathetically. "We don't expect you to be fearless, we need you to be brave."

Lydia pressed her sticky lips together, curling them and licking the salt off of the inside of them as her tears trickled past each of her layers, like peeling an onion. "I'm not afraid of the mission," She informed Adrianna guiltily. "I'm afraid of—of the thing that Jackson—" Lydia inhaled a huge gulp of air in the hopes of soothing her aching throat, but found that it only made it worse.

"You're scared of the Alpha-Kanima." Adrianna finished before Lydia could compose herself enough to do so, herself. The girl who was younger by only a few months, laughed, her eyes twinkling. "Lydia, that's what we're all afraid of." She shared, placing a steady hand over Lydia's jumping knee. "It's dangerous and we already know that people have died and are still dying out there. No one wants to talk about what could happen if we're next, but it's in each of our minds."

"Thank you," Lydia met Adrianna's sharp gaze. "But it's not the Kanima I'm afraid of; I mean, yeah, I don't want to die, but there's something else that's scaring away my wits. Something worse."

Adrianna waited, not saying a word. In a way, it made it easier to carry on without those false condolences she'd been expecting. It was like Adrianna knew loss—which, of course, Lydia knew that she did—and wasn't willing to indulge in the customary apologies when she knew they wouldn't make any difference, whatsoever. Jackson would still be gone, turned into a monster Lydia hadn't even known existed until less than an hour ago.

"I just—I can't get the thought out of my head." Lydia gesticulated with her hands, trying to find an easier way to express herself. Never before had she had that particular problem. "I know he's not himself right now, that the Kanima has taken over, but I can't help but wondering if..." Lydia swallowed, gathering up all her courage before uttering her last words. "What if it really is him, inside that thing? What if there is no Kanima alter-ego? What if Jackson's the one that's really killing all these people?"

"It's not him." Adrianna immediately responded, her words holding such certainty that, if Lydia had been anyone else, she would have instantly believed her. "I met him before he evolved into the Alpha-Kanima, when he was just the beta. There was a personality split no one could account for, not even you. Do you remember?" She asked her.

Lydia nodded. She brushed her pasty hands over her arms, feeling the ghosts of Jackson's fingers as he'd pushed her into a wall. In her ears, his voice rang, loud and angry, so unlike the boy she'd come to love. And yet, there was a part of her that had known Jackson had a dark side—a side he kept hidden from nearly everyone—and it was still possible that all those instances had simply been that side, surfacing for the first time in many years.

"Jackson wasn't himself half the time I knew him." Adrianna went on. "He was bitter, angry, violent, and a total self-righteous jerk." Looking away for a moment to ostensibly collect her thoughts, Adrianna lowered her voice when she spoke next, as though she was attempting to phrase something delicately. "Lydia, on some days he wouldn't even glance my way and it was like I didn't exist to him, but on others..." She sighed heavily before continuing. Alarm bells began to ring in Lydia's head. "On other days he was a lot more interested. One time he even made a pass at me in the showers."

Lydia wasn't the type to be jealous, especially not of Jackson, who had made it painstakingly clear that he could and would do whatever he wanted with whoever he wanted, while they'd been dating. But it had been a long day. Jackson had died, her own emotions were high-strung at best and panicked at worst, and Lydia realized too late that she was only one inch away from cleanly snapping in half.

"He did what?" She disbelievingly stated, her voice thickening the longer Adrianna's words bounced off the inside of her brain.

Adrianna sat back a little so that she matched the new distance Lydia had quickly shuffled between them. "Jackson hit on me." The huntress rephrased. "But that's beside the point. What I'm trying to tell you is that, even then, it was obvious that there were two sides to Jackson; the human and the Kanima." Adrianna backpedalled faster than Lydia had ever seen anyone manage to do without tripping over their own tongue. "The odds are that the same thing is happening now. That Jackson is still in there, only he's not in control, the Kanima is."

Pushing down the jealousy that had creeped up on her and forcing her rational brain to function, Lydia found that Adrianna's theory made perfect sense. It was very possibly that Jackson wasn't the one terrorizing Beacon Hills, that he was a mere slave to the Kanima's will. But somehow, Lydia knew it wasn't the truth. Somehow, she could just feel that Jackson was a bigger part of it than anyone could have ever thought.

"I understand where you're coming from," Lydia tried to dial back the condescension, but found that it was her only outlet for the hurt that had ricocheted inside her damaged heart after finding out that Jackson hadn't been as faithful to her as she'd foolishly assumed. "But, as much as I want to believe that it's what's really happening, I just can't."

Lydia placed a hand against her chest, searching deep inside Adrianna's eyes for understanding. "I know Jackson. I love him." She found herself repeating for the third time that night. "And as unattractive as it might look, it's still very likely that Jackson has always been the only one inside his head. He's not the good guy you think he is." Lydia warned Adrianna. "He's unstable and unsettling, passionate and vengeful, kind and unimaginably cruel."

Her mouth ran dry as she thought about her own cruelty. Lydia had treated Jackson terribly before the lacrosse game. He'd wanted to apologize and set things right, when all she'd wanted to do was shove his own short-comings back in his face and make him hurt just as badly as he'd made her hurt when he'd left.

She'd had her chance, then, to finally clear the air with Jackson, but her own greedy ambitions had stolen it away from her. And then he'd died and the guilt had been crippling. She'd understood her mistake, too late, and there had been no way for her to correct it.

Then, somehow, he'd been alive again at the warehouse when Stiles had finally decided to help her, and she'd seized the opportunity in a heartbeat. Lydia could only hope that the moment they'd shared where she'd admitted her real feelings, hadn't been too little, too late.

"If Jackson really is all those things," Adrianna cautiously stated. "And he's been himself throughout all the murders both of his masters have forced him to commit—then why do you still love him?" She wondered after a second of deliberation.

"Because," Lydia answered without really thinking too hard on the subject. "No matter how bad things get—how many lives he takes or laws he breaks—I know that, in his own way, he'll always love me with all of my many mistakes." She grinned just thinking about it. "And if he can do that for me, I think it's only fair that I do the same for him."

There was a long minute of silence that followed and permitted Lydia to daydream in her head of all the times she'd had to forgive Jackson, and how they evened the odds in their own ill-advised, miss-matched ways.

"Lydia," Adrianna began, her tone airy and light even as her words landed like heavy stones in Lydia's stomach. "You know that if Scott can't find a way to save him, I'm going to have to—" She cleared her throat before clarifying. "We're going to have to do whatever we can to stop him."

Save or stop. Lydia knew those weren't the first words on Adrianna's mind, but she shook it off, regardless. Just like Jackson, and even herself, Adrianna had many aspects to her. She could be the ruthless huntress Lydia had only just truly met, or the compassionate friend that had saved her life more times than she could count or fully understand.

"I know," Lydia assured her friend, easing her tense posture as she slid back into the middle of her seat, breaching some of the air that had acted like a buffer between them. "But I also know that you'll do your best to save him." She added pointedly.

When Lydia looked into Adrianna's eyes, what were normally guarded, incredibly hard to read emeralds, appeared startlingly clear and troubled. She was warning her, Lydia came to realize. That guilt, the sorrow which clashed against the jagged edges of Adrianna's sharp personality, it was a message, an apology.

"Right?" She uncertainly beckoned an answer. "You'll at least try, won't you? You wouldn't give up so easily?"

Lydia held tightly to the hope that she hadn't dreadfully misjudged her friend's character. When Adrianna pressed her lips together, avoiding Lydia's hazel eyes, a piece of her heart began to wither and die even as Adrianna half-heartedly nodded her head.

"I'm sorry, Lydia." She morosely told her, brown and blonde, stringy hair falling in front of her pale cheeks and masking the hollow dip that carved it's way into her friend's youthful skin as all the light drained out of their conversation. "I can't make any promises."

Try as she might, Lydia couldn't hide how her fingers shook even wilder as she pushed away Adrianna's hollow words with as much vigor as she could muster. "I'm scared," She confessed, wondering if there was a way she could worm the answer she really wanted, out of Adrianna's puckered lips. "And really nervous. Are you nervous? You don't look it."

Adrianna smiled, the action a simple courtesy with not emotion behind it. "Trust me, Lydia," She replied, taking out a short knife from a slit Lydia hadn't noticed in the other girl's boot and twirling the blade distractedly. "You don't actually want to know if I'm nervous or not."

"Sure I do," Lydia unthinkingly retorted, slightly offended that Adrianna would have assumed so much about her, already. "It matters how you feel. You're probably Jackson's only chance at redemption." By the time the words had left her mouth, it was too late for Lydia to take them back.

A cold feeling spread across her back, slinking through her veins and dipping back into her heart, carving it into little slices that had no chance of ever being stitched back together. "Oh my god," Lydia breathed heavily, huffing through her nostrils and shakily sucking air in through her slightly slackened jaw.

"Don't think about it." Adrianna commanded sternly. Twisting in her chair to face Lydia, Adrianna flipped the short, fold-able blade in her hand so that the handle was pointed towards Lydia and the sharp metal was clutched in her palm. "Here, take it. I'll teach you a thing or two to keep your mind busy." She offered.

Lydia was so grateful to have a distraction, she didn't even think before her clammy fingers wrapped around the stiff, plastic-like handle of the knife. It was clumsy at first, to learn how to hold it close to her body without cutting herself, but eventually, Lydia got the hang of it.

By the time Adrianna had finished teaching her most of the basics, almost an hour had passed, and the promise of a bright sunrise only a few more hours away was the only thing keeping Lydia on her unsteady feet.

Her instructor sat in one of the chairs abruptly, almost as though she'd become dizzy, and Lydia found herself wondering when the last time any of them had eaten, was.

"Are you okay?" Lydia questioned, concerned. "Should I call Scott?"

"No, not yet." Adrianna muttered under her breath, clutching her head as though she was in pain. "It's too late. The Kanima's one step ahead of us, now. We've waited too long." She growled frustratedly, stringing together concepts that made no sense to Lydia. "I was right; we should have fought it the moment it left that warehouse."

"Adrianna, what is it?" Lydia tried to coax out an understandable answer from the distraught girl. "What's happening?"

Dragging her fingers over her forehead, down her temples and chin, and then allowing her hands to drop down to her lap, Adrianna finally stared up at Lydia, looking her directly in the eyes.

"It's started," She uttered, her voice hardening until it was nearly unrecognizable. "Gerard's final curse upon this world. The endgame has begun."

And not a moment later, Stiles plowed through the doorway leading into the back room of the veterinary clinic, his cheeks flushed and his pupils dilated into tiny dots. "You've got to see this." He exclaimed, each breath rattling in his chest and fanning through Lydia's hair like a miniature hurricane. "The Kanima, it's changed directions. It's not heading for the city anymore, well, not directly anyway," He hurriedly told her, holding out his cell phone for Lydia to see the video playing in the background. "We were right. The Kanima's weakness is Jackson."

Lydia frowned, leaning forward to get a better look at the news clip that shook across the screen. If she squinted just enough, the large, white object in the center of the blurry picture came into focus long enough for Lydia to realize what it was.

"That's Jackson's house." Lydia understood, her voice rising in pitch as he snatched the phone away from Stiles, who hardly acknowledged the action. And then, much like the Sheriff's station had hours before, the home exploded as a comet of scaled wings and sharpened terror plowed through the building, reducing it to shambles. "What the hell?" She whispered, her heart pounding in her ears.

"We need to hurry," Adrianna stood up suddenly, sliding her leather jacket back over her shoulders and adjusting the already tightened straps of her corset. "Before it's too late. We need to go, now."

The knife was still in Lydia's hand as Adrianna rushed across the lobby, towards the back room where she knew the others were still gathered together, and Lydia felt the sudden desire to give it back to it's proper owner. "Here, you should have this back." Lydia called out as she held out the knife to her friend's retreating form.

Looking over her shoulder, Adrianna grimly shook her head. "Keep it." She told Lydia, stopping momentarily with one hand splayed across the wooden doorway. "I have a feeling you'll need it more than I will."

Conquering her sudden, nearly debilitating uneasiness to ask one more question, the question that had been nagging at her since the very beginning, Lydia straightened her shoulders as the word left her mouth. "Why?"

Adrianna smiled, although the tilt of her lips appeared garish and predatory more than it was comforting. "Because it's time to enact that very dangerous plan of ours." She replied before disappearing through the doorway.

#-#-#-#-#

Allison tightened her bow string for the fifth time in just as many minutes as she sat in the passenger seat, directly across from her father. She could practically cut the tension between them with one of her knives as she grudgingly forced her hands to rest against the smooth wooden curve of her bow.

"What you did back there to your cousin," Her father began lowly, his words carrying a seriousness that was impossible to miss. "You know that was wrong, don't you Allison?" He asked her.

She'd been dreading this moment since she'd stepped foot inside the car. Yes, Allison technically knew what her mistakes were. She shouldn't have yelled and accused Adrianna in front of everyone else, but—to be fair—Allison had only been trying to get a reaction out of her so-often stoic cousin. But, like all things pertaining to her mysterious cousin, the reaction Allison had gotten, hadn't been the one she'd been expecting.

"Do you think I'm stupid?" Allison retorted hotly as she recalled, in vivid detail, how Adrianna had nearly stripped away all her walls, just to talk some supposed sense into her. The nerve of that girl never ceased to surprise Allison. How could she have ever thought that they were the same?

"No, Allison, I don't think you're stupid." Chris tiredly replied, his foot releasing the gas as a wailing ambulance sped past them, heading towards the sheriff's station as they made their way further into the city. "Don't make this about you. If you really understand what you did wrong back there, then I shouldn't have to tell you not to do it again." He continued once the road was clear.

Allison was so tired of being treated like a child. It was as though no one thought she could handle herself without supervision; like she wasn't good enough to hunt with the rest of them when she'd had the same, or more training than most of the myriad squad of protectors.

"I'm not a kid anymore, you know." She finally erupted as smoke began to fill the air outside, circling in tiny tornadoes above sections of asphalt that were torn to gravel-like chunks. Her father swerved the car to avoid a car-sized crater in the road, the Camaro and Jeep in line behind him, doing the same. "Everyone seems to think that this is too big for me—that I don't know what I'm doing or I'm going to get hurt—but what no one wants to remember is how easily I was able to kick all of your asses back at the warehouse, before Gerard's Kanima stopped me from doing any more damage."

Her father sighed, not even bothering to chastise her for swearing. If he hadn't been driving, Allison was sure he would have placed a weary hand to his forehead. It made a twinge of guilt sizzle at the pit of her stomach, which she quickly stamped out.

"Like it or not, dad, I'm a part of this world." Allison sternly continued. "I have to do this. I have to prove to you, all of you, that I can do this. If I get hurt, that's on me." She finished in a quieter voice. Scenarios of her possible death flashed through Allison's mind, causing her stomach to clench painfully as the nerves finally set in.

"Oh, Allison." Chris reached out blindly and took hold of Allison's clammy fingers in his right hand. "You never needed to prove anything to anyone, much less me." He informed her gently, tearing his gaze away from the beaten-up road to look directly into Allison's moistening brown eyes. "Gerard has messed with your head. We all know that. But it doesn't matter if you have to go on this mission, or a hundred more, to feel secure of yourself again. I'll be there, watching your back." Grinning slightly, Chris slapped the top of her hand lightly as he pulled away. "That's what fathers do, isn't it?"

A knot developed in Allison's throat, making it hard to swallow. She nodded mutely, trying in vain to collect her scattered emotions. As the car plowed past an abandoned pickup truck, which was smashed into a small blue sedan, Allison focused her attention on looking out of the windscreen at the disaster before them.

Everywhere she looked, fire, ashes, and destruction were wrought upon the town she'd called home for nearly a year. The suburban area they were driving through was nearly unrecognizable. If it hadn't been for the smashed remains of Jackson's house, Allison wouldn't have been able to tell where they were.

"We're getting closer." She realized, chewing at her lip and slipping on her leather, finger-less gloves as she prepared for the worst. "How much longer before we catch up?" Allison questioned her father, remaining as detached as she could while blinking away the tears gathering in her eyes.

"It's hard to tell," Chris replied just as professionally, their heart-felt conversation all but forgotten as their hunter personas took over. "Judging from the rate of the Kanima's known trajectory, we should have a visual within the next kilometer."

Allison nodded. She remembered what the news clips had shown. The Kanima was unstoppable now that it had evolved. Strong and fast, capable of flight and who knew what else, but for whatever reason, Scott, Adrianna, Deaton, and almost everyone else had agreed that it seemed as though the Kanima's trail of destruction had a pattern to it.

It was thinking, not just mindlessly tearing apart their city. It had a goal; one which Adrianna seemed to think was to destroy every remaining piece of Jackson Whittemore's time as a human, in order to prevent a re-occurrence of the momentary loss in power that Lydia was able to bring about when she'd given Jackson his key back.

Allison had been too angry to admit that the theory made a great deal of sense, but now that they were getting closer to the Kanima, riding through it's crumbling wake, Allison silently thanked her cousin for keeping a relatively level head through it all.

"Should be just around this corner." Her father mumbled quietly, his words clipped as though he was short on breath as he turned the steering wheel, lazily directing the car through a wide turn. "You better get in the back." Chris told her as the smoke turned to patches of dying fires slowly growing in height and intensity as they neared the creature responsible.

Without another word, Allison slung one of her legs across the seat, climbing awkwardly into the back of the pickup they'd chosen out of the many cars her family owned, for this very purpose, and sliding open the small window to crawl into the bed of the pickup.

Her father handed Allison her bow and arrows through the open gap. His stare was earnest and worried as he kept one hand on the wheel, his upper body contorting so that he was facing her. "No matter what you're feeling or how much you want to be reckless," He reminded her for the last time. "Be careful, Allison."

Balancing as the truck drove over a set of particularly deep, freshly carved potholes, Allison nodded her chin, the pinched skin between her brows complaining as she wrapped her hand around her bow and ignored the feeling. "I'll try." She half-promised, not yet ready to pledge away her only chance at redemption.

"Remember," Chris told her, whirling around to face the road again so that only his voice carried out to where Allison was kneeling, her shoulders hunched over as the open air whipped through her hair and tore at her clothes. "I love you."

Her shredded heart gave a quick beat at her father's words. The ice in her veins thawed out, allowing her muscles to unclench and move with greater ease. The trembling jitters in her body lessened until they were barely noticeable.

It was just in time, too, because not even a moment later, the truck groaned loudly as it sped over a hill to reveal what Allison's first real-life encounter with the Alpha-Kanima would look like.

Of all the things Allison had expected to see—a large, lizard-like dragon being at the top of that list—Allison hadn't been nearly as prepared as she'd thought she'd be for the sheer intelligence which glittered in the Kanima's eyes as it turned to stare at her. A part of her had wanted to forget, at least for a moment, the magnitude of the threat; the lives at risk.

But now, as she got her first clear, up-close look at the beast they were intending to fight, Allison knew that forgetting was no longer an option.

The Kanima was bigger, if that was even possible. It's length was close to three whole school-buses lined bumper to bumper and it had to be at least a hundred feet tall. Not only that, but it was also shinier, almost as though its scales were healthier somehow. It still resembled it's previous form in that it had two arms, two feet, and a long tail, although the similarities ended there.

If Allison squinted, she swore she could make out barbed spikes protruding from the end of the Kanima's much thicker, much more dangerous tail. It's limbs were over-sized as well, chunky and strong as the beast hunched over on all-fours, its large, leathery wings spreading outwards around it like a shield as its beady yellow eyes glared back at her.

For an inexplicable reason, Allison remembered an acquaintance she'd made some time ago during her time living in Texas, and how she'd explained the process of shedding to her after showing Allison her pet lizard.

If the idea hadn't seemed so far-fetched to her, before, Allison was sure she would have brought it up. Now, she regretted not taking the risk to inform the others as it seemed that her worst fears had come true. Whatever had happened, whether the Kanima had shed its skin or somehow continued to grow, all that mattered now was dealing with the dragon-sized beast as best they could.

Lifting her bow, Allison tightened her trembling grip over the wooden handle and carefully knocked an arrow. She breathed deeply, closing one eye to get a better grasp of where her aim should be. It seemed as though there were miles of scaly hide for her to choose from, but Allison knew she couldn't just shoot it anywhere.

She would have to get its attention. Allison might only get one chance. She'd have to make it count; she'd have to make sure it hurt.

Her family's code came back to her, reminding her of her duty. "We hunt those who hunt us." Allison whispered, solidifying her resolve and drawing back the arrow-string even further as she prepared for what had to be her best shot.

One, Allison counted in her head, preparing herself for the most dangerous round of target practice she'd ever undergone. Two. She straightened her shoulders, standing as tall as she could as she narrowed her eyes on a spot just beneath the Kanima's chin where the scales seemed less fortified. Three. Her fingers loosened over the arrow, less than a millimeter away from releasing it as she inhaled sharply.

And then, just before Allison could commit to her task, a horde of people came rushing out of an apartment complex and began to swarm the truck. Her concentration broken, Allison hurriedly glanced back into the cabin, locking eyes with her father.

"Do it," He silently urged her, his words lost in the tumult around them, even though Allison could still read his lips. "You have to—" But before Allison could finish interpreting his words, a thunder crack so loud, Allison feared the world had split in two, resounded through the air.

Hair whirling about her, Allison's frantic gaze darted through the crowd, eventually landing on the nearby apartment building. As she witnessed the Kanima, which had appeared to be peaceful—even distracted—a moment before, crash into the towering structure. It punched a hole through the building's first and second levels, compromising the foundation and causing the front half of the building to collapse in on itself. As their car was engulfed in smoke, fire and rubble burning and crumbling loudly only a few meters away, Allison swore she could feel her heart stop beating.

The screams drifted to the back of Allison's consciousness. Burning intensity began behind her eyes as the Kanima's unyielding stare refused to be blinked away from her sight. It had been challenging her, Allison realized too late, and now dozens of innocent people had died.

Scrunching her nose, Allison sniffled, blinking to clear her vision. Hate, familiar and sickeningly twisting in her gut, reared its ugly head. This time, she used it to do good, raising her arms high up into the air as she re-adjusted her aim and stance.

"No one else dies," Allison promised to herself, a calm determination settling over her as she stiffened her muscles to account for the jostling of the truck as bystanders continued to crowd around, rushing to the safest place they could find or simply standing still, in shock. "Not today. Not if I can help it."

She gritted her teeth, pulling back so far on the bow-string that Allison feared it would snap and whip into her face. Still, she forced it a few inches further, holding her breath as she lined up her sight-line on the supposed chink in the Kanima's armor.

If her hunch was wrong, and her target wasn't the weakest point on the Kanima, Allison considered whether her arrow would even have any effect. Maybe it would just bounce off. But maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't.

That chance was enough for Allison's stance to hold steady for one more second, her lips twitching as she tried to express her conflicting emotions through a sneer-like frown, before she released the arrow and hoped for the best.

As it sailed through the air, Allison willed it to fly higher and faster. It had to work. Otherwise, they had no other way—short of using their clumsily-crafted plan and becoming human bait—to garner the Kanima's attention.

"Come on, come on." Allison muttered at first, her footing abandoning her as the truck was pushed from side to side by terrified hands and bodies, her knees colliding painfully with the metal floor beneath her as she barely prevented herself from falling over. "Come on!" She yelled, desperation in her voice, as the arrow lodged itself into the tiny gap of scales beneath the Kanima's chin.

Adrenaline pumped through her body, mixing with the joy of accomplishment and creating a rush that promised to keep Allison awake for several more hours to come. "Yes." She cheered lowly, some of the bystanders catching onto her enthusiasm and craning their necks every which way to catch a glance at what Allison was looking at.

The tiny arrow seemed half its normal size as it stuck between the Kanima's scales, and while it didn't appear to have hurt the daunting beast, it had certainly alerted it to Allison's presence. Snorting lowly, Allison almost expected flames to jettison out of the Kanima's nostrils as it turned away from the building and towards her.

Her response was instantaneous. Panic and fear. Pounding her fist against the roof of the truck, Allison kept her eyes glued on the Kanima as her heart leapt into her throat. "Let's go, we've got to go!" She shouted over the screams and deafening shrieks as the Kanima's fifty meter wing-span began to flap, lifting it into the air with great effort.

"I'm trying!" She heard her father yell in response, the horn blaring as he tried to clear the road of civilians. Allison didn't have time to wonder why nobody was running away from the approaching Kanima. All she could focus on was the drastically diminishing distance between it and her.

"Drive dad," Allison desperately repeated. "Drive!"

Gale-force winds buffeted through Allison's hair, toppling what was left of the rubble heaps that had once been buildings and threatening to lift the truck off of the road. Finally, the stunned crowd dispersed in a frantic stampede of terror as they battled against the force of the Kanima's wings. Each large, delayed flap tossed trashcans and other unsecured debris across the scene. Allison had a brief moment of recollection about a book called the Wizard of Oz which she'd been forced to read for her grade nine English report, and how they might be carried up into the air in the tornado-like air current, just as Dorothy had been.

Revving the tires so that fumes of burnt rubber mixed with the acrid ozone-tainted atmosphere, it seemed her father had a similar fear as the spinning wheels finally grasped hold of the asphalt and the car took off down the road.

It was not a moment too soon as the Kanima followed after them at break-neck speeds. Still kneeling in the back of the truck, Allison leaned closer to the cabin as she tried to shield herself from the slipstream of air the car had entered.

Allison looked out behind her, watching the Jeep and Camaro navigate around the damaged highway as the formation of cars barely managed to stay ahead of the Kanima. Out of the opened back of Stile's Jeep, Scott and Isaac rolled across the pavement and took a short second to right themselves before running slightly behind the squadron of vehicles with their supernatural speed.

From the Camaro, Derek and Peter launched themselves similarly, landing on their feet and taking less time to catch up with Scott and Isaac. Lydia's fiery red head rose up out of the Jeep and Allison found herself wondering how her best friend had been so brave, all along, without anyone having realized it. She stared down the Kanima fearlessly as Stile's clumsily kept the car on the road. Inside Derek's Camaro, Allison could barely make out her cousin's intensely focused features.

Gathering her wits once more, Allison brought her bow back into position and pulled a total of five arrows from out of the quiver lying at her feet, the strap wrapped around her ankle to prevent it form being blown away.

Tying a length of rope to the ends of each arrow, Allison aimed lower onto the Kanima, near it's feet—which hung closer to the street as the rest of it was lifted off the ground—and shot them off one by one.

"This plan better work." Allison whispered beneath her breath as the arrows sailed through the air and embedded into the hide of the Kanima exactly where she'd intended for them to.

She couldn't bring herself to think of what would happen if it didn't.

#-#-#-#-#

"Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid." Stiles chanted under his breath as he roughly jerked the wheel and caused his beloved Jeep to cant to the side as he swerved to avoid a crater in the road. "Why in the hell did I ever agree to this?" He asked himself as he foolishly took a glance in his rear-view mirror.

Without even noticing, Stiles' foot pressed down harder on the accelerator as he took in the sight of the hundred-foot tall, winged Kanima careening through the air after them. It's maw was gaping wide open, revealing at least a dozen rows of razor sharp teeth as it screeched loudly, nearly splitting his eardrums.

"Calm down," Lydia muttered uncertainly from beside him, her hands clutched tightly in her lap. Stiles' shoulders rose unconsciously to try and block out the ringing in his ears and Lydia faltered when he took a second to glare heatedly at her. Gulping, she continued with only slightly less confidence. "Focus on the driving and let Scott and the others do their jobs. We have a plan, remember? This is going to work." But to Stiles, it sounded like she was reassuring herself, more than she was him.

"Yeah, we've got a plan." He bitterly agreed, flexing his fingers uncomfortably where they grasped the wheel with whitened knuckles. "But taking into account that we're literally using you as human bait and my life is in danger for the third time tonight, I've decided that it's even more stupid than I was."

A large bump in the road jostled them in their seats and Stiles had to bite his lip to keep from using an especially colorful swear word. "Has Allison fired those arrows yet?" He questioned as his hand reflexively drifted to the gear-box where he swiftly changed gears and pushed his Jeep to the limit as he gained speed on the other, newer cars, beginning to catch up.

Stiles saw Lydia pressing her lips together out of the corner of his eye, but he didn't have time to worry about hurting her feelings. As she leaned over the side of her seat, looking over her shoulder and out the side of the car towards where Allison was precariously balancing in the back of Chris Argent's truck, Lydia seemed to nod before answering.

"Yes," She tightly responded, her fingertips—which were clutched on the edge of his seat to keep her balanced—brushed the fabric of Stiles' sleeve. "Yeah, Allison's shot the arrows. We're ready." Lydia finished, pulling away to stare at him imploringly.

"That's good." Stiles told her, his brows furrowing as he focused on navigating the ruined remains of the once pristinely paved street. "Let me know when Scott, Isaac, Derek, and Peter dive into the action." He informed her, his lips puckering in concern when Lydia didn't reply.

Her green eyes were wide and frightened when Stiles found a chance to look away from the road. He didn't have to wonder before he knew why. If Stiles himself hadn't been such a socially-ostracized nerd who depended on Scott as his only source of friendship, he probably would have freaked out a lot more when he'd found out about the supernatural world. Stiles could only begin to imagine how Lydia was feeling with the added stress of the monster flying closely behind them.

"Hey," He gently reassured her, awkwardly taking one hand off the wheel to lay over top of Lydia's cold, trembling one. "It's okay." Stiles hesitantly began, only to flush and stutter as he realized his mistake. "Well, it's not actually okay. Being chased by a very large dragon probably doesn't count as 'okay' and neither does witnessing your boyfriend turn into said giant dragon," He rambled apologetically, licking his lips as he tried to make sense of his conflicting emotions. "But what I mean to say is that, um, with me—in this car—you'll be safe."

And it must have been the right thing, because Lydia cracked a small smile and curled her fingers around his, squeezing gratefully before letting go. "Thank you, Stiles." She breathed a shuddering huff of air out of her nostrils in amusement as the words sounded foreign coming from her. Stiles didn't think he'd ever heard her thank someone before, much less him. "Okay, they've left the cars." Lydia cleared her throat, frowning as she quickly extracted her hand from under Stiles', seemingly just realizing what she was doing.

Stiles nodded stiffly, swallowing the acrid taste in his mouth as he remembered his place in Lydia's life, and returned his spare hand to the wheel. "Great," He spat more harshly than he'd intended, too busy glancing in his mirrors and judging the distance between the werewolves and the fast-moving Kanima, to bother correcting his tone. "Get out there and hold on." He commanded as Chris and Adrianna slowed down just enough so that both their cars flanked him.

Lydia silently did as he asked, unbuckling her seat-belt and moving to the back where she was able to stand up, half her body rising above the metal roll cage of the jeep so that her red hair swept around her face like a real flame.

"Okay, good." Stiles breathed to himself as he briefly watched Scott and Derek beginning to climb onto the Kanima's legs, which hung closest to the ground, using the rope attached to the arrows Allison had shot only a moment before, to aid them. "Now all we've got to do is keep it busy." He understood.

As the Kanima wailed, shaking its legs to try and dislodge the stowaways, Stiles tried his best to keep up with the other drivers. Despite the fact that Adrianna was his own age, she drove just as well, if not better than the eldest among them; her own uncle, Chris. Stiles figured it must have had something to do with her sharpened reflexes and hunter training. His Jeep, of course, couldn't be held accountable for his own slightly delayed reactions.

Slowly but surely, the Jeep began to fall behind once more. The motor made a whining sound of complaint as black, acrid smelling smoke poured out of the front hood. "No, no, no, no, no." He cried desperately, fiddling with every control he could get his hands on as he tried to control the car's rapidly overheating engine. "Don't do this to me now, baby. Just a few more miles. Come on, you can make it." He encouraged the car, cringing when wiper fluid sprayed all over his front windshield and the smell of burnt rubber invaded his senses as the car barreled over a section of charred asphalt.

"Stiles, watch out!" Lydia yelled from behind him, drawing his attention away from the inside of the cabin back to the rear-view mirror where he saw that the Kanima had gotten heart-stoppingly close, its jaws less than a meter away from snapping down on the rear bumper.

"Dammit," He swore, pushing down his foot all the way on the gas pedal even as the smoke turned into a full-fledged fire in the engine. "Lydia, we've got a serious problem." He shouted over the traumatizing crunch of metal as he changed gears once again.

Stiles didn't hear her response, but the searing glare he received in the mirror was all that he needed to know. Her greenish brown eyes had never seemed so much like fire until that moment, where Stiles was able to feel the first-hand effects of one of Lydia's deadly stare-downs.

"Okay, yeah," He squeaked nervously, more to himself than anyone else, as the noise was sure to have been drowned out in the catastrophe his prized jeep had become. "You probably already knew that."

Despite his best efforts, the jeep took a turn for the worse. Their speed decreased and Stiles fruitlessly stomped down on the accelerator for a moment before realizing that it was useless. He jerked the steering wheel every which way, but moving the vehicle was nearly impossible now that the power steering had been disabled.

"Oh crap," Stiles brushed a frustrated hand over his face as the two cars on either side of him shot forward, leaving him and Lydia in the dust. "What am I going to do now?"

Lydia, who had quickly caught on to the direness of their situation, turned around and set her hands on the shoulders of the front seats. "Come on, Stiles." She urged him, her porcelain features smeared black in places from the noxious smoke as she reached out for his hand. "We've got to leave the car. Allison and Chris are coming back for us right now."

Sure enough, as Stiles looked out the front windscreen, past the smoke which stung in his eyes and the fire which burned the insides of his nostrils with each choking breath, the black pick-up truck had swerved around and was now heading straight for them.

The jeep was crawling by this point and the distance that Stiles had managed to gain between them would be barely enough time for them to escape. But if they hurried, they just might make it.

"Okay, let's go." He reluctantly agreed, unbuckling his seat-belt and accepting Lydia's assistance as he made his way to the back of the jeep.

He kneeled down, using his hands to steady himself against the jeep's rear hatch, memorizing the cold feeling of the car's metal against his skin before he and Lydia glanced at each other and, reaching out to hold each other hand's, leapt down to the still-moving pavement beneath them.

It wasn't nearly as jarring as it could have been, had the jeep been moving at a faster speed, but that didn't mean that Stiles got out unscathed. His knees collided with the asphalt, his momentum tearing through the fabric of his jeans and burning into his flesh. The hot, moist, stinging in his kneecaps informed him of his wounds before he even had a chance to examine them.

Lifting himself to his feet, Stiles was painfully aware of the approaching Kanima as its yellow, slitted eyes regarded them greedily and it's large—almost bat-like in physiology—wings, quickened their beating to allow the beast to gain on them.

"Come on!" Stiles yelled, his voice straining with terror.

He roughly pulled Lydia to her feet from where she was sitting down on the ground beneath him, as sheer, undiluted, human survival instincts took over. He broke into a flat sprint so fast, even Coach Finstock would have been proud of him as Lydia struggled to keep up in her bare feet. Although he was afraid she'd wound herself on the many shards of glass and patches of burning asphalt, Stiles understood that it was a better alternative than running in high heels.

They were halfway across the road, less than four meters away from the stopped truck and Allison's frantic waving, when the Kanima reached them.

Stiles didn't know what came over him as he pulled the hand connected to Lydia's sharply into himself, using the leverage to wrap his arms around her lithe frame as he tried to protect her from their fate. His chin nestled in her hair and he only had a moment to shut his eyes tightly and inhale her sweet, strawberry scent, before the humid, rotting stench of the Kanima, along with it's deafening roar and the damaging force of its wings—which threatened to steal Lydia away from him and toss him to the floor like an unwanted toy—over-powered everything else.

God, please, Stiles found himself praying as time seemed to stand still. Not Lydia. Take me or anyone else, but not her.

He'd never had much luck with praying before. Stiles had done it for his mother, but in the end, she'd still died. At one point, he'd even considered doing it for Scott—who still needed a lot more guidance than Stiles could provide. But now, when it mattered the most for him, it seemed that his luck had finally changed.

The earth-quake beat of the Kanima's wings began to fade away as it gave one final, warning shriek which really did send Stiles to the floor, before setting it's violent gaze over the horizon and beginning it's ascent into the heavens.

Like tiny specks, Stiles could see Derek, Peter, Isaac, and Scott clinging onto the Kanima's hide for their lives as their plan fell apart before his eyes. In his arms, Lydia began to tremble and he felt her tears drip onto his collar. It gave him enough strength to pick himself up for the second time and lead them both across the remaining distance to the waiting pickup.

"Are you either of you hurt?" Allison demanded of them as she helped Lydia up into the bed of the truck and did the same for Stiles. There was something about her stare that unnerved Stiles. It wasn't until a moment later that he realized why.

"Yeah, we're fine." He informed her, moving over so that he was directly beside the cabin of the truck and sitting down beside Lydia's shaken form. He frowned as he noticed crimson stains caked to the bottom of Lydia's feet but chose not to bring the subject to light as he took hold of the strawberry blonde's clammy hand.

"Good," Allison responded coldly, slapping her hand down on the roof of the truck and signaling for her father to begin driving again. "Because, if you hadn't noticed, we've lost a lot of time and the Kanima's finally decided to play by its own rules."

Stiles reeled for a minute, absorbing the hostility in his friend's stare as the truck pulled away from the curb slowly. "Well, I'm sorry if saving our lives inconvenienced you, Allison." He sarcastically quipped. "Next time, I'll make sure our impending deaths don't bother you so much."

Ordinarily, Stiles knew that his smart-mouth could predictably get a reaction out of Allison, but now—dealing with this strange, hot and cold version of the girl his best friend was in love with—it was obvious that none of the same standards applied.

"Whatever." Allison merely brushed off his comment, kneeling down at the far end of the truck's bed with one of her hands clutching onto her bow as the other served to steady her balance. She sorted through her quiver to avoid answering Stiles' unrelentingly confused stare.

"What's happening now?" Lydia asked him quietly, the braids her hair had been held back in, unwinding and allowing reddish tendrils to fall in front of her soot-stained face. "Where are we going?"

"We have to follow the Kanima," Chris Argent spoke up from inside of the truck, his face just visible through the open window Stiles had seen Allison crawling out of only a few minutes ago, in order to start off their insane plan. "No matter where it goes, if we don't find a way to distract it, people will die." He informed them, the skin between his brows pinching worriedly as he glanced back at Allison before redirecting his eyes outwards, onto the road.

"How do we do that?" Lydia wondered. The fingers clutching Stiles' hand tightened exponentially, nearly strangling the appendages, as Lydia's uncertainty and fear became known to him.

This was all new to her. She wasn't prepared to handle any of it, but there was nothing Stiles could do, because—no matter how long a person had to adjust—nothing could truly prepare you to face the monsters of the supernatural world. He should have known. He'd had a whole year to prepare, and even still, he was way out of his comfort zone.

"Don't worry," Chris assured them, taking a moment to stare off to the side, where Derek's black Camaro drove in parallel with them, Adrianna maneuvering behind the wheel. "I have a pretty good idea where it's going to be."

#-#-#-#-#

Where there had once been chaos, there was now order.

Where he had once had two voices and two conflicting minds, there was now harmony.

Where he had once desired to show mercy, there was now only rage and the bitter desire for bloodshed.

The wind felt frigid against his scaly hide and served to calm him some as he distanced himself from the redheaded woman his heart ached for. Something deep inside of him had snapped when he'd been a moment away from ending both human's lives—the skinny boy and the mysterious girl—and he hadn't been able to fight it. Instead, he'd flown away.

A pinching in his back reminded him of the pesky werewolves which were still attached to his scales, clinging with their nails in order to prevent themselves from falling to the ground at what might have been fatal heights.

He grunted, deep in his throat, and took a quick glance over his left shoulder. Sure enough, the four werewolves riding his back were still there and as bothersome as ever. The one closest to him, whose eyes glowed bright red in response to Jackson's stare, slashed his sharpened claws through the uppermost layer of the Kanima's skin.

It didn't hurt—Jackson would have done much worse to the daring wolf, if it had really hurt—but even so, he felt a spark ignite within him and reacted to the werewolf's threat by suddenly pitching to the side. He felt a jolt of satisfaction when each stowaway slid down his skin a ways before regaining a handhold.

Soon enough, he would kill them all. Soon enough, he wouldn't have to worry about wolf packs or hunting parties. He'd have his own pack; his own army to lead and wreak destruction thereby. Jackson couldn't wait.

His wings shivered in the air the closer he got to his destination. Beneath him, the minuscule houses and streets sped past in a blur. Out ahead of him, he could just make out the distinct shape of the large, brick building his human self had hated for so long.

Beacon Hill's High School would be next to feel the aftershock of his rage and might. When he was done with it, there would be nothing more than rubble and charred bodies in his wake. He would make them pay for the years of unrestful sorrow and boredom that he'd had to endure.

The damage that the four werewolves were able to do upon him as he neared the high school began to increase as they organized themselves. He grunted, but didn't feel the needed to retaliate. Not yet. But when what could possibly have been his one and only physical weakness, was exploited, he could no longer hide his ire and anguish.

He roared out in pain as a sizable patch of shiny scales on his right flank were pulled upwards and ripped away from his flesh. His altitude plummeted as the others caught on to the method, beginning to tear out as many scales as they could—on his legs and arms, soft underbelly, spiky head, long and clubbed tail, along with the skeletal support of his wings.

The wind tore at him just as much as the wolves did, however Jackson didn't make a move to slow his descent. Already, he could feel at least one of the annoying runts clinging to his back, beginning to lose its grip. If he could just hold out a few meters longer, perhaps he could shake them all off.

But even as he considered it, Jackson knew it couldn't be done. The ground was rapidly growing beneath him, swallowing up his entire line of sight and looming dangerously as the threat of splattering against the pavement became realer with each prolonged, agonizing second.

Finally, when he could distinctly make out the heat signatures of hidden pedestrians and isolate each and every grain of asphalt beneath him, Jackson pulled out of his steep dive, despite not having lost any of the werewolves along the way.

He felt a surge of triumph as the momentum he'd accumulated during the drop, forced one of the four off of his back. Although it wasn't the most aggressive of them, or the smartest, Jackson allowed himself to revel in the victory.

One had been removed, now only three remained.

Keeping himself low to the ground, so much so that Jackson's clawed feet brushed against the pavement every so often, he poured on the speed, slipping into a wind tunnel that buffeted savagely at every orifice. Jackson felt a chitinous membrane coat his eyes as he blinked, blurring his vision but otherwise preventing the damage done by the forceful winds.

A spike of red hot pain stabbed his shoulder once more as he was distracted by two fast-moving objects approaching from the far right. As he realized that the remainder of the hunting party was catching up to him, Jackson snorted in discomfort. This time, the three remaining werewolves had managed to clamber onto the same side, each taking turns shredding Jackson's flesh in the same spot. Their efforts alone had been painful, but combined, Jackson could already tell that, without a quick elimination, they would be capable of killing him.

Breathing out through his nostrils hotly, Jackson's beady eyes narrowed as his huge wings bent the wind to his favor and his calculating mind came up with a scheme to eliminate the pests on his back once and for all.

All around him were residential one or two storey buildings. Jackson knew, somewhere deep inside himself, that there were people living inside those homes. But as the werewolves' claws continued to rip at his scaly hide, nearing the vulnerable muscle fibers concealed beneath, Jackson couldn't stop the instinct to survive from taking over.

With a minute adjustment at the tip of his wing, Jackson leaned to the side and veered directly through the first building. The impact was dull and caused a barely noticeable throbbing to echo through his bones as the scales that he still had shielded most of the impact. The same could not be said about his stowaways.

His lips parted in sinister pleasure as he felt one of the pesky heroes slide down his back and stab claws through his hindquarters in order to remain on board Jackson's body. His chest vibrated in what might have been a laugh as his ears picked up their whines and snarls of surprise and pain.

Bricks fell before him, concrete splintered like chalk, wood and various other substances scattered like sand in the wind as he continued through the next house, and then the next, and the next.

Just as he was certain that the werewolves were one tiny push away from falling to their deaths or ultimate failure—Jackson honestly didn't care which as long as they left him alone—the long row of houses ended and Jackson was forced to pull up into the air as he careened off into what would have been a deserted side street, had the rest of the werewolves' forces not been waiting for him.

Arrows peppered his neck, hurting more than he was willing to admit, and the indignation roiling in his gut felt like a basin of hissing acid. He had the overwhelming desire to snarl and spit at the increasing threat that the pesky war party was, but before he could give in to it, a spray of persistent gunfire slammed into his chest.

Roaring angrily, Jackson hovered in the air, turning so that he could face the bigger threat and inadvertently knocking off another wolf from his back. No longer caring about them as much as he had before, Jackson focused his vision on the assembled cars before him. Heat signatures were blurry and indistinct, but even so, he could vaguely identify where the hail of bullets slowly eating through his armor and nearing his flesh, was coming from.

He opened his jaw and, satisfaction filling his blackened heart, prepared to swallow the god spawn whole. As the meters closed, shrinking to feet which would soon be inches, Jackson reveled in the way that the huntress continued to assault him with her rifle. His eyes shone a bright, frightening yellow as his prey's bullet supply ran dry and she hatefully glared at him with no other weapons at her disposal.

She was his to kill. His to savor.

Yet, there was a part of him that wondered if that was what he really wanted, but before he could truly consider the prospect of allowing her to live, the space closed between them.

Just as he could almost taste her; could feel bone breaking and hear her blood curdling screams; a different voice entered his mind, stronger than his master's had been and much louder, making his decision for him.

"Stop!" It cried desperately. "Jackson, stop!"

And, remarkably, he listened.

#-#-#-#-#

Derek's fingers hurt worst of all.

At least, that's what he kept telling himself.

Watching Isaac fall off of the Kanima's scaly back, hands grasping for purchase but unable to find any, golden eyes quickly fading to scared blue as they locked onto Derek's stare moments before he was hurtled towards the asphalt beneath them at break-neck speeds; that was certainly not bothering him, at all.

His arms ached worse, that was certain, from holding on despite the Kanima's best attempts to knock them off. And then there were his lungs, which felt like they were inhaling lead instead of oxygen, thanks to the rapid changes in pressure and altitude during their crazy flight. But Derek couldn't forget about his fingers, either, and the strong claws he'd never thought would ever get this close to breaking.

But in the end, no matter how hard he tried, there was still an ache in his chest that he couldn't excuse. An ache that had only started after he'd watched his only remaining beta—whose loyalties were debatable at this point—plummet to what very well could have been his death.

And so, when Scott had fallen next and the bullets and arrows started raining down on them, some barely missing his head, Derek could no longer pretend like he wasn't affected.

"Dammit," He cursed as the Kanima neared Adrianna. She held a shotgun blasting what seemed like silver pellets in a rapid, unpredictable pattern, and in doing so, resembled her mother even more than she normally did. "This thing's really starting to piss me off." Derek rumbled, glancing to his side and connecting his stare with his uncle's.

Peter grinned, catching Derek's full meaning without having to hear an explanation. "On three?" The older man asked, his voice turning that haunting shade it always did whenever there was violence or bloodshed to be had.

Nodding, Derek cracked his stinging knuckles and posed over the raw, red patch of nearly exposed flesh beneath the tough layers of scales that each of them had painstakingly been peeling off over the course of their flight. In the background, Derek noticed that the shattering noise of the shotgun's ammo had been silenced and he didn't need to look to know that Adrianna was out of options.

"Stop!" A distinctly feminine voice shrieked as Derek's muscles coiled taught and his mind regressed to the predatory, animalistic kill-or-be-killed mindset, ready to spring at a moment's notice. "Jackson, stop!" Lydia Martin yelled desperately.

Derek resisted the inappropriate urge to roll his eyes, settling for a frustrated growl as he was forced to restart his countdown. He was not under the same naive illusions that Lydia was, in believing that she could somehow stop the Kanima, or bring back Jackson's humanity, after everything that had happened.

"Don't." Peter warned, shaking his head firmly as he watched Derek, supposedly reading the rogue intentions flying about inside his mind. "She can help. Just wait and see." He reminded him.

"You said the same thing last time, and look where that got us." Derek argued, but grudgingly hung back as a part of him considered the facts, shoving away his impulsive side.

Just as he was certain that the Kanima would swallow Adrianna entirely, his heartbeat inexplicably doubling and his palms sweating nervously at the thought, he felt the giant beast's flank begin to tense and move beneath him as it turned towards Lydia.

"No way," He breathed, surprise clouding his mind for long enough to watch as the Kanima snarled towards Lydia, it's sights no longer focused on the high school. "You've got to be kidding me."

"Derek, Derek, Derek," His uncle tutted, grinning impishly in that superior way of his. "You never learn, do you?"

A muscle in Derek's jaw twitched as he dug the claws on his left hand deeper, which was serving to keep him balanced where he perched on the Kanima's shoulder, as they began to move once more.

"Shut up," He grumbled acerbically, turning his face away from Peter and slicing as deeply as he dared into the semi-exposed meat beneath him, Peter following not a second later.

The Kanima reacted instantly, screaming horrifically loud as both Hales began a more furious assault on Beacon Hill's winged doom. Deep down, Derek knew that if they didn't stop the Kanima now, they would never get the chance. Losses would soon lead to deaths, and that was something he didn't want to see happen.

As greenish blood began to seep onto Derek's hands, tingling ever so slightly and slickening them to the point where he was tempted to take a small break if only to wipe away the muck on his pants, the Kanima's attention gradually broke away from Lydia and back onto him and Peter.

"This is not good," Peter cried as the Kanima snapped it's foot-long fangs only a few feet away from his uncle's head. "They've got to keep it occupied. We can't kill it if it's trying to kill us!"

"You don't think I know that!" Derek shouted back, irritation flaring in his veins and burning like fire as he pressed himself close to the Kanima's hide in order to avoid the brunt of the impact from the Kanima's wings, which were relentlessly trying to bat him away.

"Then do something!" Peter retorted just as hotly, never one to be outmatched in a yelling match, even if his life was in serious danger.

Derek dug his hand further into the soaked muscle fibers, twisting this way and that as the Kanima shrieked and snarled in response. "I'm trying." He spat through his teeth, barley louder than his thundering heart.

"Try harder." His uncle insisted, scuttling up just in time to avoid the clubbed end of the Kanima's much larger, much deadlier tail, and laughing maniacally as the cartilaginous, spiked mass collided with the Kanima's own side, directly where Peter had been only a second before.

Raising his brows, Derek clenched his jaw and pushed down the murderous thoughts swirling through his mind. He could punish Peter for his insensitivity later, if they were all still alive by then. In that moment, Derek hated to know that his uncle was right. He did need to try harder, for all their sake's.

"Alright," He muttered to himself, his eyes flittering to the street racing past beneath them and the consistent volley of arrows and bullets that gauged tiny holes in the Kanima's belly from their backup on the ground. "Think, Derek, think." He urged, quickly discarding the others as a source of viable help and searching on the Kanima for a weapon or clue as to how to defeat the seemingly invincible creature spawned by his own impure treachery against Jackson's greedy exploitations.

His eyes were pulled upwards, only a small space away from his hand, as a barb-tipped arrow pierced between the damaged scales of the Kanima and stayed there. As he stared at the sharpened projectile, small trickles of the Kanima's blood dripping along the shaft, an idea came to life inside his head.

Licking his lips, Derek reached up and yanked the arrowhead free from the chink in the Kanima's armor. The beast didn't stir, apparently unaware or numb to the action. Derek took it as a good sign, tightening his hold over the small, seemingly ineffective arrow.

"I've got an idea!" He shouted as loudly as he could up to the point where he thought his uncle might be. Derek didn't dare to take his eyes away from the Kanima, watching as it obliviously tried to snap something in it's jaws on the opposite side of it's body.

"Well, it's about damn time," His uncle responded after a moment of concerning silence. "I was starting to think that I was the only one doing anything up here." He quipped.

Derek frowned as a moving figure in the corner of his eye caught his attention. He squinted, wondering if his mind was playing tricks on him, as what appeared to be a person running on all fours alongside them, climbed onto a stalled truck on the side of the road and vaulted themselves onto the Kanima's swinging tail.

"Oh my god," Surprise flashed through his veins, followed by respect. "Peter, are you seeing this?" He found himself asking as Scott McCall rode the bucking tail, slowly pulling himself onto the creature's immense backside and making his way towards Derek.

"I'm a little busy at the moment!" Peter indignantly yelled, the following grumble vibrating in the Kanima's chest easing the seeds of worry that threatened to sprout within Derek.

"What the hell are you doing?" Derek wondered as he met Scott halfway, kneeling beside the lumpy ball joint that connected the Kanima's wings to it's shoulders. "I thought you got thrown off."

"I did get thrown off." Scott replied, a cheeky grin lighting up his features with a proud sort of mischief that Derek had never seen before. "You didn't think I was going to go down that easy, did you? We still have a job to do."

Derek nodded his head, a sinking feeling suddenly taking hold of his stomach as guilt knotted his conscience. "Yeah," He half-heartedly agreed, the arrow suddenly much heavier in his hand. "We have to save Jackson."

"Exactly." Scott agreed, having to raise his voice to be heard over the buffeting winds. "Is something wrong?" He innocently questioned as Derek's brow furrowed and his joints refused to move him anywhere.

Derek knew what he should have done. He'd done it before, many times, to Scott and countless others. But this time, he found that he couldn't lie. "Don't worry about it." He said instead, cleverly evading the question. "Peter's getting hammered. We better act fast."

"Got it," Scott easily followed the bait. "You take the top and I'll take the side." He said, the orders flowing out of him so naturally, it took a long moment for Derek to dispute them within himself.

"No," He abruptly voiced, clearing his throat and starting more subtly when Scott frowned at him in confusion and slight suspicion "You take the top, I'll take the side. I've got experience with the Kanima's wings. We don't want you to get knocked off again, do we?" He convincingly argued.

Scott stared at him for a moment, gauging Derek's carefully blank features. "Sure," The younger boy agreed after a tense minute. "Whatever works." He offhandedly supplied, already making his way up and over the ridge of the Kanima's spine to begin the perilous trek to the Kanima's head.

"And Scott," Derek couldn't help adding as the beta looked over his shoulder at Derek. "Good luck."

"You too." Scott somberly replied. And there was something in his eyes—though they were still as young, hopeful, and brown as ever—that made Derek wonder if he didn't know the real reason for Derek's elusiveness.

Shimmying his way back to where he'd been, Derek forced his mind to depart from the troubling reality of his situation and focus on the task before him. He had to make it look like he was trying to stop Jackson, not kill him, even though Derek was fairly certain that it would only buy him a few more seconds before Scott and everyone else caught onto his true plan.

"On three," He repeated to himself, positioning the arrowhead inches away from where Derek guessed the Kanima's aortic artery was located thanks to his limited biology skills and enhanced hearing; he idly hoped the deafening flow of blood that he was listening to intently, wasn't his own.

Derek could just see the top of Scott's shaggy head from where he was clinging to the Kanima's upper shoulder and across from him, his uncle Peter was in clear view. The promise both of them and Adrianna had made resurfaced in Derek's memory, reminding him of the responsibility that lay before him.

He'd been a monster before. He'd even allowed his own betas to consider him a heartless tyrant. But Derek hadn't taken an innocent life—if Jackson's could even qualify as such anymore, although the heavy weight in Derek's chest told him it didn't matter—in a very long time. That didn't mean he couldn't remember it. He didn't think he'd ever forget that first time and all the times after.

Death was funny like that. It stuck with you, no matter how hard you tried to shake it off. And so, Derek had given up trying to purge the memories of his first kill. The fact that his eyes were red now, instead of blue, didn't mean anything as long as he carried the sin in his heart.

He knew it would be the same when he drove the arrow through Jackson's vein and then his heart. Derek could only pray that he could live with himself, afterwards.

"Come on," Peter urged him, a new cut on his forehead blistered around the edges and bleeding heavily into his eyes. "What are you waiting for? Do it."

Biting his lip, Derek brought the glittering arrowhead to the surface of the Kanima's scales, pressing with barely enough force to dent the heavy armor. Breathing deeply, Derek steeled himself for the judging looks, the hateful whispering, the social out-casting, and the mental anguish that he was likely to go through when he killed Jackson Whittemore.

And then, he pushed with all his might and shut his eyes as blood squirted up into his face and the arrow embedded itself into the Kanima's flesh.

An ear-shattering wail ripped past from the Kanima's throat and the consistent wind and light-weight feeling in Derek's gut stopped all at once as the creature ceased it's pursuit of the black Camaro and SUV that the Argents were driving.

"Uh, Derek," His uncle uncertainly began, bitter condescension and the first few hesitant signs of fear beginning to leak into his voice as the Kanima continued to scream, bucking and twisting as it tried to shake them off in earnest, this time. "I think you missed."

"Thanks for pointing that out." Derek grit through his teeth as the metallic tang of blood filled his mouth. He slid down the Kanima's shoulder several meters and had to dig his foot into the space above what he assumed to be the clavicle in order to prevent himself from falling. His claws raked across the Kanima's hide, leaving a trail of angry scratches over the shiny scales and stinging blisters along his fingertips.

"Got any other brilliant ideas?" Peter relentlessly mocked from above, this time, unable to dodge the incoming tail as it slammed into his ribs and splintered bone. "Ah!" He grunted, clutching onto the still-moving tail and digging his claws through the muscular tendons.

Derek was about to reach out and help, but before he could, the enormous tail littered with razor sharp spikes and spines, pulled away, dragging Peter along with it and catapulting him up and over the Kanima's head.

"Peter!" He instinctively called, glancing up only to see Scott already looking his way from where he was perched just a few meters behind the Kanima's head. "Scott, did you see where Peter went?" Derek questioned frantically as he began to lose control over the Pandora's box of emotions he ordinarily kept tightly locked away.

"Yeah," The beta responded hesitantly. His eyes were clouded although not overly so that Derek didn't pick up the slant of disapproval and perhaps even anger that burned in his gaze. "He seems to be handling himself. I don't think he needs our help." Scott supplied in a clipped tone.

Derek bit down on his tongue as the Kanima abruptly jostled in the opposite direction it had been, nearly throwing him off balance. "Okay, then. Get over here and help me end this." He waved him over.

Scott didn't move. In fact, he didn't even seem to breathe. "I don't think so, Derek." The younger boy eventually conceded. His eyes flickered to the side, over to where the arrow was stabbed through the Kanima's thick hide. "I may be young and naive, but I'm not stupid." Scott informed him bitterly. "Whatever you're doing, I want no part in it."

"You can either do this on your own," The boy who Derek finally understood was a much better alpha than he was, even without gaining the true power, set out with finality. "Or you can follow me and my plan and we can save Jackson."

It was tempting. Really tempting. But Derek wasn't a kid anymore. He'd learned when people were past saving, the hard way. And, unlike some people, he didn't have to experience the same lessons twice in order to accept them.

"I'm sorry." He found was the only thing he could say in response to Scott's proposition before turning away to try again, one last time.

"I can't believe I ever trusted you." Scott shouted a few moments later, when Derek had roughly pulled the arrow from where it was stabbed between layers of flesh and climbed to the center of the Kanima's chest with the weapon in one hand.

Derek didn't allow himself to look back at Scott. He had to look forward. He had to concentrate. There was no more room for mistakes. Staring out ahead of himself, Derek's gaze caught on his Camaro, which was parked on the street less than a few blocks down. The side mirror's reflected the slowly brightening sky back into his eyes and forced him to squint.

Somewhere deep in his heart, he prayed for a miracle; for some kind of distraction that would allow him to slay the Kanima once and for all.

If he hadn't been looking, Derek was sure he wouldn't have seen Adrianna Argent's distinct features staring back at him through the tiny, fragile mirror. The air charged in Derek's lungs, feeling more like electricity or gasoline than nourishing oxygen. He held on tight as the Kanima continued to spin and dive.

He wanted to say something, anything to explain the constricting ache in his heart and the tingle in his spine, but he couldn't force his vocal chords to function properly.

Thankfully, he didn't have to because not even a moment later, fiery emerald meeting dull green, a scream like no other Derek had ever heard before pierced the ozone around him, forcing the air to vibrate and the earth the rumble.

Even the sun took a moment to pause in it's slow ascent, as Lydia Martin unleashed something distinctly inhuman within herself.

Derek took his chance. His hand splayed across the scaly chest of the Kanima, right where he thought the creature's heart should be. Though his fingers were wet and slippery thanks to the blood already coating the arrowhead and shaft, Derek's grip didn't falter.

"I can't believe it, either." He muttered under his breath, as an answer to Scott's betraying insult.

As he lowered the sharpened arrow tip over the shiny, jewel-like surface of the Kanima's skin, Derek clamped his jaw shut and dug the claws of his spare hand deep into the flesh before him as the Kanima lunged towards Lydia, having all but forgotten about him.

He pushed Scott's reaction away from his mind, his uncle's uncertain fate (what should he care about the traitorous murderer, anyway?), and the entirety of the blame and guilt he would feel after the deed was done.

But what he couldn't push away, was the memory of Paige, so young and fragile, pleading with him to kill her as agony spread through her veins. Slowly, her angelic features morphed in his mind until they resembled Jackson's the moment he'd asked for the bite. It had been his fault then, and it would be his fault now.

What's the difference? He couldn't help asking as he hesitated one second too long. What separates him and her? What makes it any better?

Derek didn't have the time to find out as, in the next instant, he was falling fast and far, the arrow tumbling from his grasp as he understood that he'd failed in his task when it had counted most.

#-#-#-#-#

The car seemed heavier than it had a few minutes ago, although Adrianna knew it was only her imagination. She'd stopped to pick up Isaac as he'd fallen from the Kanima, but even as she was reminded of his presence in the seat next to her, Adrianna couldn't tear her thoughts away from someone else.

His stare had been somehow different than all the other times Adrianna had caught him glaring at her. This time, there had been no hatred. This time, the memory of her mother hadn't tainted her in Derek Hale's eyes.

Adrianna's chest constricted, the muscles tightening as though an invisible hook had embedded through her rib-cage and begun to pull and tug with a force that could only be described as startlingly intense. Adrianna had never felt this way before.

Licking her suddenly dry lips, Adrianna flexed her cramping grip over the black Camaro's steering wheel. Her eyes couldn't break away from the face in her side mirror. She'd never noticed before, how guarded those cloudy green eyes of his could be, and yet they could reflect so much emotion if he wanted them to. Now, they were clear and desperate for help; her help.

"Lydia," Adrianna leaned slightly out the window to call over to the truck driving parallel to her. "Lydia, I need you to scream."

The red head in the open bed frowned at her, hair flowing about her head like a halo as she pushed herself closer to the edge of the truck in order to shake her head at Adrianna. "What did you say?" Her ordinarily haughty voice, which was now streaked with muted panic and terror, asked her.

Breathing deeply, Adrianna hitched the steering wheel to the side and waited until her borrowed car had sidled up beside Lydia, to speak again. "Scream," She instructed her friend. "Distract the Kanima."

Lydia's lips puckered as she drew back, her brow furrowing in confusion despite the fact that she had clearly understood Adrianna's words. "Okay." She agreed after a moment of puzzled consideration, although it seemed more like a question, than a statement.

"Um," Isaac hesitantly spoke up from the long stretch of silence that had befallen him. "Not to seem like a pessimist, but how is Lydia screaming going to help anything?"

"You'll see." Adrianna vaguely replied, her flittering eyes incapable of escaping the image in her head, even as she stared back out at the road in front of her. She remembered the way her mother had described Derek and couldn't bring herself to see him the same way, no matter how much bad blood still lay between them.

"Okay," Isaac uncertainly muttered, not agreeing with her, but not discussing the topic any further. He shuffled in his seat slightly and glanced in the rear-view window. "Whatever she's going to do, she better do it fast."

Her upper lip curled frustratedly. "I know." Adrianna echoed, her muscles clenching so that her body molded to the chair around her.

Not a moment later, the constant buzz of the engine and the chaos beyond them—buildings on fire and crumbling, civilians evacuating, car alarms blaring, fire hydrants gushing water—was interrupted by a scream.

A smile crawled onto Adrianna's features as her ears began to ring, but just as she was certain that Lydia would push harder and scream even louder, the other girl's air ran short and the Banshee wail died on her lips.

"Shit," She cursed foully, slamming her palm against the top of the steering wheel and having to remind her foot not to forcefully push onto the brake as the Kanima fell further and further behind. "To hell with it all. I knew this plan wasn't going to work." Adrianna complained, bringing the car to a slow stop.

"It's okay," Isaac reached out a hesitant hand to place on Adrianna's stiff shoulder. "What were you expecting to happen? She did exactly what you told her to. She screamed." He reminded her gently.

"No," Adrianna shook her head as she averted her gaze from the apologetic Lydia, who was standing up in the bed of the stationary truck beside them, her expression as lost as Adrianna had ever seen it. "She didn't use her heart, she used her head."

The explanation died halfway out of Adrianna's mouth. How could she expect Isaac to understand, or anyone for that matter, when even she couldn't bring it to words. It wasn't something you thought about, it was something you felt deep in your bones and your very self.

"Come on, Lydia." She silently urged the perplexed red head, watching as Stiles took her arm and began talking to her. "You can do it. Just use your heart. Use your heart, Lydia." Adrianna chanted.

"You know, I hate to break it to you," Isaac began, a sarcastic tone in his voice that wasn't as unkind as it was jarring and unexpected. "But you should probably come up with a new plan."

"Shut up." Adrianna frowned, refusing to look at him as her mother's stubbornness reared it's ugly head within her. "She can do it. I know she can."

Isaac didn't need any further encouragement as he sunk into his chair and remained quiet. Adrianna instantly felt a guilty rock settle into her chest, but set aside the disconcerting reaction in order to keep her wary eyes on the Kanima, which was attacking Peter, Scott, and Derek with all it's might.

"Dammit," Adrianna grumbled, clenching her jaw as the words she was about to say stung her mouth bitterly. "You might be ri—"

But before she could admit her mistake to Isaac, a seismic wail ripped outwards like a shock-wave, shattering the windows of the Camaro and pickup truck and flattening the pavement in a fifty meter diameter of them. Streetlights exploded all around, small fires were blown out, and every creature was suddenly silenced as the scream ran its course.

"Oh my god," Isaac whispered, and it was only when Adrianna turned to gauge his reaction that she realized he had his hands firmly clamped over his hyper-sensitive ears. "What was that?"

Her eyes glittering with mirth, Adrianna glanced in Lydia's direction proudly as the young woman slouched against Stiles, all but drained by the action, and then back to Isaac.

"That..." She dramatically intoned, shifting the gear into drive and slamming down on the gas pedal as the Kanima's head whipped back in their direction and the beast began careening towards them at top speeds, once more. "Was one hell of a distraction."

Avoiding the many potholes in front of her, Adrianna silently urged Derek to finish the fight before it could get ugly. From the many, short glimpses she snuck in her rear-view mirror, Adrianna could see that he had an arrow clutched in his hand, ready to stab into the Kanima's heart.

"Hold on," Isaac's voice interrupted her rampaging thoughts. "What's Derek doing?" The lanky teen twisted himself in the seat to look behind them, at where Derek was poised to kill the Kanima.

"He's doing his job." Adrianna grit through her teeth as the car plowed through a mass of twisted rebar, sparks and terrible scratching noises invading her senses as she forced the Camaro onwards.

"But, I don't understand." Isaac naively wondered. His honest blue gaze burned into the side of Adrianna's face. "The plan was to save Jackson. What he's doing—it looks like he's trying to kill him." He disbelievingly admitted.

"Sweetie, now is not the time to bring things like this up." Adrianna crooned, her anger transforming into sickly sweet condescension as her spare hand began blindly searching through the back seat of the car.

"Oh great," Isaac huffed, placing a hand across his forehead. "This is just amazing. He really is trying to kill him, isn't he?" He finally understood.

Pressing her lips firmly together, Adrianna glared into the side mirror, hoping that Derek could feel the intensity of her outrage as he continued to take all the time in the world. "I didn't say that." She tried to discourage the young beta beside her as her fingers brushed the still hot end of her mother's shotgun and she hissed in pain.

"You didn't not say it." Isaac countered sharply. As he noticed her discomfort, he reached back to where her hand was, his long, cool fingers wrapping around her clammy, blistered ones. "What are you looking for?" He quietly added, a frown pinching his brows together.

"My pistol." Adrianna hotly admitted, blinking rapidly to clear the sudden moisture from her eyes as she struggled with herself to push Isaac away when all she really wanted was for him to keep holding her hand. "I can't find my damn pistol."

Her voice cracked and Adrianna was forced to swallow thickly, avoiding Isaac's curious stare. If she looked, Adrianna didn't know how or why, but she was certain that her defenses would crumble away and she'd end up showing him just how scared she actually was.

Jackson had been her friend, too. Well, not her friend—that was too close and she hadn't known him for that long—but he'd meant something to her. He was quite possibly one of the only people who would ever understand her pain; the intense fear of abandonment that often stopped her heart and clogged her veins and her unspoken rule to keep everyone at arm's length should she lose them, too.

And now, here she was, planning to kill him.

"You mean this pistol?" Isaac questioned, the familiar steel grip of her weapon fitting nicely into her open palm as Isaac uncurled her damaged fingers.

"Yeah," Adrianna nodded her head, pretending as though the heat behind her eyes didn't exist and the tightness of her throat was simply due to too much smoke inhalation. "That's the one." She managed to say with more strength.

Leaning forward, Adrianna checked behind her shoulder to see how far Derek had gotten and the moment she'd done so, she wished she hadn't. "No," Adrianna barely voiced, her vocal chords pulling taut and refusing to break as she snapped back into position facing the road. "This can't be happening." She brokenly whispered, her tone high-pitched and uneven.

"What?" Isaac demanded, their previous conversation nearly forgotten. "What is it? What did you see?"

Squeezing her eyes shut for a long moment, Adrianna searched within herself for the strength she needed desperately. She thought about all the obstacles she'd overcome in her short life, the countless monsters she'd killed, fears she'd set aside for the greater good, and boundaries she'd crossed without even noticing.

I am stronger than this, She told herself as the picture of Derek Hale falling away from the Kanima, the unused arrow still in his hand, burned into her retinas. And if only for a moment, she believed it.

"Derek's gone." Adrianna eventually informed Isaac, her previous emotional turmoil stuffed away, deep inside, where it couldn't hurt her...for now. "He failed. The Kanima's still alive and so is Jackson. Beacon Hills is still at risk and, without some kind of intervention, Scott and the rest of us can't defeat it." She coldly stated the facts.

Isaac was silent for a long minute, clearly assimilating her sudden mood change, before responding. "What can we do?"

The gears in Adrianna's brain turned and spun like a well-oiled machine. Not for the first time, she found herself indebted to her mother and grandfather for their cruel, but very useful training. One of the advantages that she would always have over the others in their myriad group was that she could compartmentalize; focus on the task and nothing else.

"Do you trust me?"

Isaac licked his lips before nodding a second later. "Yeah," He affirmed, relieving an unprecedented tenseness in Adrianna's spine. "Of course I do. You know that."

Shoving the pistol into one of the straps of her corset, Adrianna hummed noncommittally as she eyed the distance between their car and the Kanima. "When I say 'Go', I want you to get out of the car." She instructed sternly, her foot hovering over the brake pedal as the car coasted along a particularly undamaged section of road.

"Out of the car?" Isaac repeated doubtfully. "Where am I going to go?"

"It'll be clear in a minute." Adrianna reassured him, taking one hand off the wheel to undo her seat-belt. "I promise." She stared into his eyes for the first time since she'd found him lying on the side of the road and picked him up, defeat scrawled across his features.

The scared paleness of his cheeks eased, natural color flooding back to the skin and giving him a faint blush. Still, the intensity of Adrianna's stare didn't let up. She wanted him to know that she meant every word she'd told him.

The last time Adrianna had promised something, it had been on the day she'd arrived in Beacon Hills when she'd made an oath to avenge Kate's death, and while that vow had yet to be fulfilled, Adrianna had every intention of honoring it, just as she would see the promise she'd given to Isaac, through to the end.

"Okay," He breathed, reaching out to take her spare hand and wrapping his slightly larger one around it. "Why the hell not, right?" Isaac tried to make light of the situation, although the humor fell flat.

Her left hand tightened around the steering wheel as she made one final adjustment, the joint of her elbow clenching tightly under the strain of her powerful muscles. "Brace yourself." She warned Isaac, who drew her hand into his chest and copied her actions by pinning one hand under the hood and pressing his knees against either side of the car.

When his eyes met hers, they were wide and trusting. Something warm fluttered in her chest but before it could blossom, Adrianna literally stamped it out, slamming her foot down as far as she could on the brake pedal.

The tires squealed in protest, rubber burning between the asphalt and leaving a trail of smoking residue in their wake. The last thing that Adrianna had a chance to consider before the car came to a full stop, was the condition by which Derek had allowed her to drive her car.

'Not a scratch.' He'd told her seriously, although Adrianna had assumed what he'd really meant was; 'Bring it back in one piece.'

Neither one, unfortunately, was possible when the Kanima's long, seemingly useless legs wrapped around the car and pulled the ton of metal, along with the two passengers within it, into the sky.

"Sorry, Derek." Adrianna muttered as Isaac laughed in surprise beside her, a hint of hysteria in his voice the further they got off the ground.

"Go!" She yelled forcefully, reaching into the back of the car in one swift motion and retrieving the broadsword she'd once wanted desperately to earn on the day of her graduation, but which she now wielded with a heavy heart. "Go, go, go!"

Shaken from his shocked reverie, Isaac sprung into action, sliding out of the nonexistent window and beginning to climb up the Kanima's long, thick legs as the winged-monster struggled to maintain it's own altitude, along with that of their car. Adrianna was close behind, making sure to avoid the talons piercing through the Camaro at random intervals.

As she and Isaac reached the Kanima's broad, sloping back, Peter and Derek were nowhere to be found. Adrianna could only guess that they had been knocked off the beast during the struggle, or else they had fled from their promise. Whichever possibility was true, it no longer matter.

She was the only one left; the only one strong enough.

The fate of Beacon Hills rested squarely on her shoulders, just as the life of one Jackson Whittemore, did.

#-#-#-#-#

Walking on solid ground again after being forced to balance on the tips of his toes and the edge of his claws for so long while riding the Kanima, was a foreign sensation that reminded him eerily of his recent revival.

His vision was focused and the previously present churning in his stomach due to the lack of total gravity, was gone. Peter would have been more than content to simply walk away then and there, leaving the other foolish children to their own devices, if it hadn't been for his inconsiderate nephew.

"Derek, where are you going?" Peter called out as he followed behind Derek's quickening gait, absently rubbing away a patch of crusted blood on the sleeve of his soot-stained shirt.

A very audible sigh from Derek was followed shortly by an irritated shrug as he turned to face him. "Where does it look like I'm going, Peter?" The younger man impatiently demanded, raising his eyebrows and waiting for an answer for only a few seconds before resuming his brisk pace in the general direction Peter remembered the Kanima was headed.

"To me," He continued on his train of thought, unaffected by his nephew's lack of interest. "It looks like you're headed straight to your death." Just like he'd planned, the blunt statement forced Derek to a stand-still. A wry smirk curled Peter's lips as he crossed his arms in front of his chest.

"What is it now, Peter?" Derek wondered as he faced him once more, spreading his arms and gesticulating along with his words. "Do you have any kind of reason to back up your claims or are you just making excuses for saving your own skin again?" He reminded him.

"Excuses? Me?" Peter reeled, placing one hand against his chest as his features pinched in distress. "Now you know that my history isn't necessarily clean as a whistle, but it's not nearly as tainted as you always make it out to be, either." He explained carefully, pressing his lips together tightly when it was clear that Derek didn't believe him. "Just because I look out for myself, doesn't make me a bad person." He regressed, scuffing a section of asphalt under-foot which simmered with the remains of a fire. "You'd do well to listen to me more often. You'll live longer."

"I'm not falling for your tricks." Derek narrowed his eyes and held up a hand as Peter began to argue, several promising examples poised on the tip of his tongue. "I don't care what you call them or whether you really think there's nothing wrong with ditching on your family and friends." His nephew interrupted. "I gave my word. Hell, we both did." He reminded Peter somberly. "We have to stop the Kanima, no matter what it takes."

"I know that!" He couldn't help his voice from rising as indignation boiled in his gut. "What did you think I was doing up there? Getting my ass kicked for fun?" Peter growled at his nephew, restraining the urge to throttle the young pup. "You have no right to judge me. Some of these kids don't know you well enough, but don't you ever forget that I know what the real colour of your eyes is. I know that you're not as good as you'd like people to believe."

"This conversation is over," Derek began to walk away. "I'm not going to abandon my pack when they need me most and I don't care what you have to say about it, or if you're going to come with me."

"Oh, so you're just going to avoid the problem?" Peter wondered angrily, stomping after his only remaining family member. "Great job. You're reverting to your old habits, Derek. Congratulations on not seeing the point." He mocked.

"Shut up, Peter." His nephew grit, his pace never faltering although the tightness of his voice betrayed how riled Peter was getting him.

"No, unfortunately, I don't think I will." Peter caught up to Derek so that they were walking side by side. "You see, I could leave right now. I could do it without an ounce of regret or moral implication and I would make out like a bandit. Those kids are too busy trying to stay alive to notice or care about my absence."

"So why don't you, then?" Derek easily took the bait, huffing tiredly as though he could sense the oncoming explanation.

"It's quite simple, really." He stretched his fingers wide, sharp claws extending as he marveled at the sight, refusing to meet Derek's suddenly curious stare. "I feel this dysfunctional sort of responsibility for you, alright. And I can't leave now if I know you're going to go back out there and probably get yourself killed." In the distance, Peter could hear the Kanima shrieking in a rare display of pain, the noise dampened from the increasing distance being put between them and it.

"You know," Derek shook his finger at Peter in an almost chastising way as a disbelieving smile curved his features. "If every word of that hadn't been an insult to me, I might actually think that you care."

"I do care, Derek." He rebutted before Derek had the chance to continue on a tangent. "I know that might be hard to believe after everything that's happened, but it's the truth. You're all the family I have left. At the very least, I need to keep you around so that the Argent's sole focus isn't on killing me." He found the guile to joke.

Derek cracked a grin, breathing out a tired, caustic laugh. "You're not convincing me of anything, Peter." He stubbornly held fast. "No matter how you choose to disguise it or if you even do care about what happens to me, running away is still running away."

"Well, I guess that's one thing I don't have to teach you about." Peter snarled, his pride smarting more than a little as he moved away from Derek as though he'd been physically hit. "You should know all about running away. You've done it more times than even me, I dare say, and yet, you refuse to accept how similar we both are."

"I am nothing like you." Derek snarled, his teeth baring into sharp fangs. "I've never killed my own family. I've never lied, manipulated, and used the people that I love for my own benefit. Don't ever compare as again, unless you want me to rip your throat out for the second time." He threatened.

Peter laughed, deep in his chest, but the anger burning in his veins couldn't be extinguished. "At least I know who I am." His skin began to heat up along with his blood as he pushed his nephew backwards by the shoulders. "You're still trying to fit a mold that's three sizes too big. Talia always had such high expectations for you. Imagine what she'd think if she could see you now; a failed alpha with no pack and a murderer who won't even accept his true nature."

"Enough!" Derek roared, his eyes shining as red as hot coals. "Just leave me alone." He continued with less force behind his words but just as much crackling emotion. "You should have stayed dead."

A pang of guilt stung in Peter's ribs but he ignored it. This was the only way he knew how to get through to Derek. He always had to tear apart the angry shield, first, before getting to the juicy bits.

"Maybe," He conceded lightly, stuffing his hands in the back pockets of his singed jeans in order to hide the way his nails sharpened, yearning to draw blood and tear flesh. "But that's the past. Neither of us can change it."

"I can try." Derek argued thickly as his stare lifted up to the sky where plumes of smoke mingled with clouds and began to fall to the ground in ashy tears of rain.

"Are you willing to die trying?" Peter questioned as their argument sizzled out into nothing more than a halfhearted debate. "Because that's what it's going to take to kill the Kanima. You tried and you failed only a moment ago. Look where that got you." He pointed out.

Derek glanced at his hand, the memory of his incompetence obviously still as fresh as their wounds. "If I don't do it," He brokenly stated. "Who else?"

"It wasn't just the two of us in that room, Derek." Peter's eyes gleamed sadistically as his nephew once more fell into the hole that had been dug specifically for him. "We weren't the only ones that made that promise. There's still someone else that can finish this; maybe the only one that ever could."

"Adrianna." He spoke her name like a dying breath, a final prayer, their last hope. If Peter hadn't been carefully leading Derek along, inches away from attaining that which he'd set out to get, he would have been more concerned about the way his nephew revered Katherine Argent's daughter.

"She's stronger than both of us; smarter and better trained, too." He eagerly listed. "She's been preparing for this her whole life. Why should we be the ones who interrupt in her moment of glory?" He twisted shamelessly.

"Don't," Derek abruptly choked. "Don't make this into something it's not. We both know that this isn't something to be proud of. Killing isn't a sport and killing Jackson won't be easy."

"Okay, so there may be a few emotional bumps along the road," He permitted Derek to win in that moment, if only so that he could win the bigger battle. "But a huntress of Adrianna's caliber and breed is sure to overcome such insignificant obstacles. She's already a murderer, or have you forgotten how easily she killed our own kind, only a few months ago?"

Derek frowned as he no doubt thought back to the many times he'd witnessed the Argent's brutality. Peter hadn't seen it for himself, but he'd felt and heard many things during and since his rebirth. Death's daughter had certainly lived up to her lineage during the few years of her young life.

"It doesn't feel right." Derek complained, his resolve crumbing before Peter's greedy eyes. "Abandoning her like this—letting her take the fall and blame for something each of us had a hand in coming up with—it's cowardly."

Peter would have loved to argue Derek's words for hours. To show his naive, young nephew how the world really worked. The self was always put before the others, no matter who your friends or family were. But instead, he merely nodded as though he understood Derek's turmoil, placing a comforting hand onto his shoulder.

"I know what you mean," He layered on the sweetness, carefully steering Derek in the opposite direction that the Kanima had gone. "It's never easy to take a step back and evaluate the situation dispassionately, but it's what has to be done for the greater good."

And the longer Peter kept justifying himself to Derek, the easier it became to wholeheartedly accept the sugar-coated lies.

#-#-#-#-#

He smiled as Adrianna and Isaac climbed all the way from the Kanima's feet, to its haunches. Derek's Camaro fell from the Kanima's clutches only a few moments later, exploding in a bright orange fire ball as the beast focused on Lydia and chasing after her. Finally, Scott was going to get the help he'd been wishing for.

But as his two friends neared, he began to feel an uneasy pit of dread forming in his stomach. There was something about the way Adrianna's expression was skewed that hid her emotions from him entirely, and although she'd always been hard to read, Scott found it impossible to gauge what she was thinking.

"It's about time you joined the party," Scott cautiously joked as he bent his knees slightly to get out of the forceful winds. "I was starting to think I was alone up here."

Adrianna's features didn't even wobble. Her lips were set in a hard line and her eyes were narrowed. Isaac, at least, had the courtesy to nod his head and allow a half-smile to pass between them, but even he seemed unusually serious.

"Yeah," The curly-haired boy said in a heavy voice that was trying far too hard to sound normal. "We're here to help."

This time Scott permitted himself to frown as confusion spread throughout his mind. "What's wrong?" He wondered, concerned at the state his two allies were in. "Did something happen? Is someone hurt?"

"No," Isaac shook his head, the motion looking as though it took all of his energy to do so. "You didn't miss much and no one's hurt." He began to explain, only to be cut off abruptly by Adrianna.

"That's enough." She placed a steady hand over Isaac's bicep, her fingers tightening in some kind of passive warning. "We can fill him in later. Right now, we've got a job to do." Adrianna reminded him.

Scott's eyes darted between them. He'd always known that Derek's first beta had some kind of crush on the youngest Argent huntress, but this—this was different. Their interactions were no longer as cold and formal. Warmth and trust was now strung between them. Somehow, Adrianna had begun to care for Isaac Lahey.

And that fact wouldn't have bothered Scott so much if Adrianna wasn't doing exactly what Scott would have done, if he'd been trying to break bad news to Allison.

"Seriously, guys." He pressed, even more worried than he'd been as he beckoned some kind of answer from Isaac, only for the boy to shy away from him, averting his gaze. "Okay, come on. What's going on here?" Scott demanded.

"Nothing," Adrianna surprised him by speaking directly to him, for the first time since they'd all left the animal clinic. "I just think everything will play out best if we forego the long and tiresome explanations and trust each other to know what we're doing."

Scott ran a hand through his messy, damp hair. It fell over his ears in sections and had been tickling his neck and obscuring his vision for hours. When the fight was over, Scott had finally decided that it was time for him to get a hair cut.

"Stop playing games with me." He impatiently pleaded. "This isn't about trust or time because we've been short on both for as long as I can remember." Scott pointed out, beginning the process of elimination to uncover his friend's strange behaviors.

"No," Adrianna conceded, her sharp green stare boring into his brown eyes unforgivingly. "This is about something much more important."

Scott knew they weren't afraid. Isaac, he could understand might be feeling some trepidation and uncertainty, as neither he or Scott had ever faced a threat of this scale. But Adrianna, who'd hinted since her arrival that her training as a huntress had prepared her to deal with monsters other than werewolves, definitely couldn't be feeling any of those things. Besides, she'd never been a coward.

"Did I miss something?" He rhetorically questioned, his hands hanging limp by his sides as he felt his brow wrinkle even further. "I thought we had a plan and everyone agreed to follow it. I thought we were talking with each other; sharing our knowledge and finally trusting that we weren't going to get stabbed in the back because there was a common goal we were all heading towards."

Isaac's chin remained firmly pointed downwards so Scott had no choice but to continue staring off against the statue-like huntress. "What happened?" He asked again, this time with only frustrated resignation in his voice. "When did you decide that it was okay to change all of that?"

Perhaps it was a trick of the nearly dawning sun, or maybe the fatigue and lack of sleep had finally caught up to him, but as he continued to watch Adrianna, doing his best impression of honest and trustworthy—no doubt looking like the puppy that, ironically enough, Adrianna's own mother, Kate, had once compared him to—tears seemed to glitter in the huntress' eyes.

Just as he was almost certain that they'd roll, fat and disabling, across Adrianna's cheeks, she sniffed, breathing in deeply, and somehow managed to control herself. "We don't have time for this." She whispered, almost to herself, as her features rearranged themselves into a perfect mask of indifference, from where she'd been inches away from plummeting into a dark abyss that Scott had never imagined to be within her.

She reached to her side, her nimble fingers wrapping around the handle of something that was partly obscured from Scott's vantage, and pulled out a gun, leveling it on Scott.

His heartbeat instantly quickened, blood-pressure skyrocketing to the point where he could feel each pulse in his fingers as he took an unconscious step backwards, raising his hands amenably.

"Okay, hold on just a minute." Scott started to say, his mind running completely blank as he desperately searched for ways to diffuse the suddenly dangerous situation. "Come on, put the gun down, we can solve this like friends. Let's talk about it. I'm sure I'll understand." He assured her soothingly.

Even though he didn't take his eyes off of the barrel of the pistol, Scott could tell that Isaac was finally looking at him. He could smell the other boy's panic and fear just as potently as he felt his own. A part of him was glad that Isaac didn't have a part in threatening him with what were no-doubt wolf'sbane laced bullets.

"You can't understand." Isaac informed him quietly, his voice slowly gaining strength as he managed to shake off some of his shock. "I didn't understand, when she told me, and to be honest, I still don't. You've just got to trust her to do the right thing." He nervously shared.

Scott bit the inside of his lip, jutting his chin out to the side slightly as he mulled over Isaac's words. "The right thing?" He repeated, blinking as he suddenly remembered the unusual way that Derek had acted when Scott had managed to return to the Kanima. "You're not gonna—" He tried to say, but couldn't bare to utter. "I mean, you can't be thinking what I think you're thinking." Scott glanced back to Adrianna and a shiver rolled up his spine. "It's wrong. You know that, don't you?" He asked.

The girl, who he had to keep reminding himself was his own age, licked her lips, the steel-like grip she had on the pistol loosening ever so slightly as she allowed Scott the briefest of glimpses into her crowded thoughts.

"It's the only way." She argued rawly.

And she didn't say any more than that, but she didn't have to. The way her lips wobbled, as though she were holding back a sob, the panic-inducing wave of tears that finally broke free from the dam she'd been stubbornly holding them back with, and the scent of fear—undiluted but courageously mitigated miles beneath the surface—did all the talking that Adrianna didn't.

For once, Scott realized that he hadn't wanted to be right.

"Was this always the plan?" He questioned as his voice strung out, thanks to the aching spread of betrayal through his bones. "Did you always know that you were going to kill him? Was that speech you made at the clinic all a lie? Is everything about you a lie?" Scott couldn't keep from wondering.

The void in his chest opened even wider, if that was possible, as Adrianna remained silent. She didn't justify her actions any further, like he thought she would have. She didn't beg him to forgive her, like he thought she should have. She didn't even allow herself to be swayed by his words, like he thought she must have wanted to. She just stood there, with her gun pointed at his chest, salty tears drying across her cheeks as no more replaced them.

"Get out of my way, McCall," Adrianna raspily ordered, the safety clicking off before he could even blink, in one swift motion. "Or I'll shoot you."

Scott would have liked to believe that she wouldn't shoot. That it was all some complex show Adrianna had crafted to disguise her inner conflict with the decision that had been reached in her heart, and that he could still see a sliver of redeemable good inside her. But he knew her better than that. He knew that, no matter what she was really feeling, Adrianna wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger and kill him right then and there.

It was what made her who she was.

Just like Scott's often foolish, naive good-nature had made him into the person he was, now. And if he looked back at it, even though there had been heart-break and pain, Scott didn't regret it, for a second. In fact, he'd do it all over again the same way, if he could.

"Go ahead," He invited her, spreading his arms wide from where they'd been raised in surrender, and creating a bigger target for her. "Shoot me. Kill me. Do whatever you have to do."

Although Adrianna masked her surprise well, it was still evident in the way her pupils blew wide and dark, nearly swallowing the forest green of her eyes. She swallowed thickly, her throat bobbing as her fingers twitched around the gun.

"Maybe killing Jackson is the only way to save Beacon Hills," Isaac spoke up as he adjusted his footing to stay balanced on the ever-shifting scales beneath them. "But killing Scott, just because he doesn't agree with us..." The boy paused, waiting for Adrianna to look over at him.

Scott felt a spike burrow through his heart as he recognized the agony of unprofessed love pulling Adrianna in two different directions. He remembered what it was like with Allison, when they'd been separated for so long because her father had discovered he was a werewolf, and he felt the pain even now, as he comprehended that it was unlikely Allison would ever allow herself to be with him, again.

It was clearly written across Adrianna's moistening gaze, how she felt about Isaac, but as Scott had secretly guessed that she might, Adrianna refused to break her stare away from him.

Clearing his throat awkwardly, completely misreading Adrianna's avoidance as the indifference she was working very hard to make it appear to be, Isaac finished his sentence with less gusto than he'd started it. "I can't be a part of this, anymore." His voice was filled with gravel and Scott understood, for the first time ever, what if felt to be a third wheel.

"If you want to finish this with my help," Isaac carefully measured his words, some of the confidence he'd gained after the bite returning to his posture and voice. "We're going to have to work together. No one kills anyone; we all get out of this alive."

No one spoke as Isaac's words rung in Scott's head. Their silence allowed the mayhem beneath them to become clear, once more. Without anyone noticing, the Kanima had significantly strengthened its attack on the remaining truck which Scott guessed Chris, Lydia, Stiles, and Allison were riding in. The jeep was nowhere in sight and if Scott hadn't seen Stiles and Lydia get to safety a while before, he would have lost his mind with worry.

"So, what's it going to be?" He urged Adrianna as a wildfire sprung up in the animal preserve only a few hundred meters in front of them. "Are you going to drop the gun and help us save Jackson—because, combined, the three of us might still have a chance—or are you going to shoot me and kill an orphaned jerk that nobody likes."

He knew he was being callous, and that reminding Adrianna of Jackson's shared situation to hers was a low blow, but Scott was desperate. He didn't know how to convince Adrianna not to kill an arrogant, insulting, selfish, totally non-deserving boy; only that killing anybody, even someone like Jackson, wasn't fair.

Beside her, Scott noticed the way Isaac relaxed as Adrianna released a heavy sigh. He foolishly followed the boy's lead, trusting his life to a connection that had never been fully explored, between the recently orphaned Adrianna, and the stuck-up, rich kid without parents, Jackson Whittemore, who had both seemed to get along during the brief times where they'd met each other as their teenage alter-egos, and not been fighting to the death as huntress and monster.

Adrianna's stare flittered away from Scott for a moment as she scanned the horizon, met Isaac's imploring gaze, and then slid back to where she'd been, all without moving an inch. Her legs relaxed their tense posture, spreading wider as the gun began to lower.

Scott breathed a sigh of relief, a smile already working across his lips.

"It's too late for that." Adrianna surprised them all by responding. "I'm sorry, Scott, but I'm not the person you thought I was." She apologized, no softness or vulnerability to her words as she squeezed the trigger once, then twice, three times and four before Scott could react.

And by then, both of his thighs were already peppered with bullets and his balance had already failed him. As he forced his muscles to constrict, taking a shaky step forward, the wind tore at his weakened form and pulled him away with barely any protest, straight off of the Kanima's back, into open air.

He fell and the howling wind ate up his regrets. Scott heard the dying echo of Isaac's objecting shout and the innumerable gunshots that followed, as he ripped across the sky and plummeted to his death. All the while, he couldn't shake one, outstanding thought.

How could I have been so wrong about her?

Not even five seconds later, Scott collided with the asphalt road. He felt his bones crack and splinter, just as much as he heard them. Breathing became torture, keeping his eyes open was an impossible task, moving from the crater he'd created was in the unforeseeable future, and preventing himself from laughing despite the pain, because he was alive and not dead, didn't even cross his mind.

From where he lay in a broken, tangled heap, his wounds slowly mending themselves thanks to a gift he'd once foolishly mistaken as a curse, Scott saw Adrianna battling Isaac in a seamless blur of ancient and modern fighting techniques, before literally shoving him off the Kanima.

He didn't stop to wonder why they had both fallen at similar heights—permitting them to live. Scott didn't even consider that it had been Adrianna's careful planning he had to thank for a handful of broken ribs and other bones he hadn't even known he'd had, instead of a shattered skull. All that Scott knew was that he'd been wrong, so very wrong, to think that Adrianna was his friend and ally.

She was an Argent, that much was clear now, and she played by her own rules.

Rules her mother, Scott hazarded a guess, would have been proud of.