"Did you poison the whole pack?" Lydia asked incredulously.
"I just made cookies!" Stiles exclaimed for the umpteenth time.
"They were poisoned!"
"I-it wasn't on purpose!"
"Stop screaming and do something, you damn ugh..." Jackson growled, grabbing his head with both hands.
They were all in pain (except for Lydia and Stiles himself), though it was nothing a human couldn't endure. It was a cold. Well, the symptoms of a cold. Jackson has a headache, Isaac and Scott cough like smokers, and Derek wouldn't stop sniffling with a trash can by his side. Although the worst of them was Peter. He was in the darker corner of the loft because of his strong headache, shivering and sniffling. If he breathed just a little harder, he'd start coughing. Stiles flinched when he heard a new coughing fit from him.
"Do you mind, um, watching over them?" Stiles asked Lydia, and the banshee rolled her eyes.
"Go," she sighed.
Stiles got a bowl with cold water and a washcloth from the kitchen and went back with Peter. The werewolf was sweating and looked half unconscious. He didn't even react when Stiles started cleaning his face. The boy didn't know why the older werewolf was the one suffering the worst, but maybe Peter was right when he said that he hadn't got all his strength back after his resurrection (or maybe he had just eaten more cookies than the others). Peter started coughing, and Stiles rubbed his back until it subsided.
"I'm going to fix this, I promise," he whispered, though he wasn't sure the 'wolf could hear him.
Stiles went back with Lydia, who was giving Isaac a glass of water.
"We have to find a cure," he said, pacing around the sofas.
"If it acts like a common cold, we just have to wait it out."
"But it's not a common cold, it's a poison of some kind. What if it gets worse?" The young werewolves could get over it, but he wasn't so sure about Peter.
"We need to know what poisoned them before looking for a cure."
Stiles bit on his thumb nail for a moment before nodding.
"I'll go get Peter's books. He must have some book on the subject." He got his keys and headed for the door.
"You know were he lives?" Lydia asked, maybe waiting for Stiles to realize that he didn't know where to go.
"Um... I may have followed him once or twice to find out," he said before leaving with a pink tinge on his cheeks.
It wasn't hard to pick the lock to enter his apartment. Any other time he would have spent hours snooping everywhere, but he was in a hurry right now. He took half a dozen books from his library that he thought might help and returned to the loft. He started researching with Lydia about poisons for werewolves, tending to Peter whenever he had a coughing fit. Meanwhile, the boys didn't seem to get better, though they didn't get worse either.
"Oh my god, this is my recipe!" Stiles exclaimed almost two hours later.
"What do you mean?" Lydia asked frowning.
"I used this recipe for the cookies!" he said, tapping on the book several times. "It was in a normal recipe website. It said it was apt for dogs." Lydia raised a judgmental eyebrow. "It was funny! You know, an inside joke."
Lydia breathed through her nose and took the book from him.
"It has a lot of spices. I don't even know this one," she said, pointing at it.
"Oh, yeah, I had to research it. It's from the cinnamon family. I just used cinnamon instead because I couldn't find it."
"Maybe that saved them. This recipe is lethal."
Stiles winced and gulped.
"There's an antidote there," he whispered.
They began to work on it, and it was ready in an hour. It kicked in almost immediately, and the werewolves recovered in a few minutes. It took Peter a little bit more, and Stiles was chewing on his nails the whole time. The 'wolf rubbed his face with both hands to wake up completely and frowned at Stiles. The boy lowered his head, picking at his nails nervously.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean... It wasn't on purpose, I'm so sorry," he muttered loud enough for Peter to hear.
"I'm not mad at you, sweetheart," Peter said softly, taking his chin between his fingers and turning his head towards him. Stiles still didn't look at him. "You thought you were providing for your pack, I couldn't be mad at you for that."
His eyes burned with tears. He could have killed them all. Even substituting an ingredient, Peter could have died.
"Sweet boy," Peter said in a whisper. "You can be lethal, but you'd never hurt us on purpose, we both know it."
Peter gathered him in his arms, and Stiles started crying, just letting it all out. He hadn't thought Peter could be so nice after almost killing him. And he hadn't thought he would worry so much about the 'wolf. There were some hidden feelings there he had to unpack.