Chapter 3:
Beacon Hills, California
"What do mean keep you out?
"But I've seen you in the sun, Stiles, you don't burn." Several questions came from everywhere, abruptly stopping when Stiles raised a hand.
"Keep us out, as in we need a spoken invitation to enter a private home, anything public like school or library is open to us. So is anything like a warehouse or basically any property that does not belong to a living breathing human is free for us to enter, otherwise we have to be invited in. Its not the direct words come in, you can say anything that just implies the words come in but it has to be verbal, a gesture won't do it."
"The reason you've seen me out in the sun is because after weeks of being kept indoors, Mother found a solution. Daylight rings. She spelled the stone, a Lapis Lazuli stone, to protect us from the sun. So long as we wear a piece of it on us like in a ring or necklace, bracelet, really anything then we can be out in the sun. but it has to be spelled by a witch first. Its also a close kept secret that not many people know about so keep it quiet please."
"What happens when you step out into the sun. You said it kept you guys indoors but not why?" Allison questioned
"We burn. Without the protection of daylight jewelry, a vampire will burn in the sun. If you stay in the sun long enough you catch fire. Watch." With that, Stiles stood ignoring the quizzical sounds behind him and stood directly to the side of the large window in the loft, in the shade, and slipped his daylight ring of his finger. Warily sticking his hand out towards the sunlight, he winced when his flesh began to sizzle and burn. Grinding his teeth, he kept it there until the appendage caught on fire, quickly yanking his hand back into his chest and doubling over it.
Derek appeared in front of him, thrusting the daylight ring on the finger of his other hand then pulling his burnt hand out towards himself and the pack gathered around them, all of them wearing alarmed expressions but the Hales turning particularly ghost like. They all made noises of relief and wonder as they watched the skin knit itself back together faster than even their own healing.
"You said you were running from your father and your siblings. Why?" it was the first thing Derek had asked him or said to him since the Alpha Pack attacked an hour ago.
"At the time we turned into vampires, none of us had actually killed anyone, only animals for food. But after, the bloodlust was too much for us to control. All of us killed while learning how to get to get a handle on everything but it wasn't until Niklaus made his first kill that my mother's darkest secret came to light. As soon as he had killed, his bones started to break one by one and he turned into a wolf. Being a wolf like that is genetic, it has to be passed down through bloodline, so the fact that Niklaus was a werewolf meant that he wasn't our parent's son, but our mother had been pregnant with him. The only explanation was that our mother had an affair with a werewolf that resulted in Nik. We shared a mother but not a father."
"So, Nik-" Erica started only to be interrupted.
"Klaus." Stiles interjected, "Don't call him Nik, that name is something only his siblings have complete freedom to use, otherwise he only lets close friends call him that; friends that he has known and trusted for centuries even then it depends on his mood. If you do ever meet him, it's better to be in the habit of calling him Klaus until he lets you call him Nik, otherwise it's a sure-fire way to piss him off."
"Got it. So, Klaus isn't your brother."
"Yes, he is; to the rest of us Nik will always be our brother, no matter who his birth father is. It was only Father that was furious at the betrayal; he told Mother that she had to bind away Nik's wolf side, so she did. Mother never stood up to him before, this was just another instance in the long list of them. After that Father killed her in a fit of rage. When Niklaus awoke, we all buried her then went to the neighboring village to find his father but we all we found was a slaughter. Father had killed and ripped apart every person in the pack, triggered wolf, humans, men, women and children. Everyone was dead and Nik's father's head was on a pike in the middle of the village square, at the center of the entire village. Father swore to kill Nik and erase the existence and proof of his wife's infidelity but the rest of us didn't agree. Elijah and Nik were the ones to raise us, they were the ones who sat with us when we were sad, comforted us when we were scared. They were our parents more than Ester or Mikael ever were. For that reason and many more, Nik will always be our brother and none of would ever choose Father over him."
"Sorry." Erica meekly spoke up.
"Don't ever be sorry for asking questions. I told you, full disclosure, whatever you want to know, if I don't tell you, or its not clear then ask. If I don't want to answer anything then I'll say so but don't hold the questions back." Waiting until he got affirmations from the entire pack, Stiles continued on.
"When Father saw that we would stand with Nik against him, he said that if 'we stood with the abomination then we could die with the abomination'. So, we ran away from Father, from our home and everything else. We stayed together, or at least tried to stay together. Eternity is a long time and tempers ran high. We disagreed with how to best protect our selves so when the time came a century ago, I ran and left, went on my own, travelled a bit before finding myself in Beacon Hills." Elaborating even more at the curious looks.
"That's why I ran; Nik and I have had our disagreements but that particular one was the straw that broke the camels back. We got into enough arguments but he got back at me through other means-"
"What other means?" Jackson spoke up
"He killed my friends and/or lovers then I repaid the favor and killed his. It was a never-ending cycle between us. We would fight about him daggering our siblings for having their opinion, he would get angry and storm off, come back covered in the blood of which ever friends or lovers of mine that he killed then I would storm off and do the same. At that point, one of our other siblings, usually Elijah would intervene and stop us before we could go further."
"You killed…?" Scott looked horrified and Stiles fixed him with an amused and exasperated look, though it had a hardened edge to it that none of the pack had seen before.
"I'm a thousand years old vampire, Scott. Yes, I have killed people before. When you've lived as long as I have then a body count is inevitable"
"But!" the uneven jaw flexed as Scott tried to get his point across without being offensive.
"But… how do I not feel guilty about it?" at the nod, he continued "Because, I saw what it did to my brother. After we were turned and everything that happened finally caught up to us, we all reacted in different ways. The brother I'm taking about is my eldest brother, Finn. He couldn't stand the blood drinking or the hurting other people, he hated it, and as a vampire everything you feel is enhanced as well as your senses."
"Finn didn't just hate hurting others, he hated himself as well. He tried to stake himself, which is how we found out that originals can't die through regular wood, then he pulled his own heart out of his chest but it only took a day at most before his healing finished regrowing it. After that, he antagonized a hunter into decapitating him, but that didn't work either, as soon as you put the separate head and body back together, they reattach but that's only true for originals, not regular vampires." Everyone looked horrified at the descriptions, grabbing each-others hands in need of comfort.
"I don't want to end up suicidal, so I don't let myself get that torn about killing someone. Besides I'm a vampire, I need blood to survive and live just like you need food. You kill animals to get meat, vampires kill humans to get blood. Same difference. Survival of the fittest if you will. Besides, vampires actually help with the over-population on this planet." Stiles joked, lightening the mood a bit as some of them snorted and smirked.
"Why didn't you run before?" Malia asked, not being to grasp the concept of staying with someone who kept stabbing you in the back.
"He's still my brother, what am I supposed to do? Hate him for all of eternity? My siblings and I swore a vow to each-other when we buried Mother. We argue and bicker, fight and attack each other, sabotage each other, stab each other in the back, plot to kill each other, but at the end of it all we are still family and we will stand together against any threat that comes forward. I may have run, but have no doubt, I will go back to them, in about a century or a couple decades, if Nik doesn't find me first. Always and Forever."
The words nearly hurt to say, especially after so long when he wasn't saying it to his siblings. The pack may be close, but he and his siblings had a little over a millennium of memories together, both good and bad. More than that the pack understood; they were the same, just not so violent in their actions against each other.
"How come we remember seeing you around when we were kids?" Erica asked.
"I have a lot of contacts throughout the supernatural world, a witch I knew had a ritual to de-age me and make me temporarily human. There were a lot of fail safes written into the spell, but I got my memories back slowly from age of 8 onwards. The full vampire powers would have come back as well, the latest being when I was 18 while the earliest being any time I was reintroduced to the supernatural world, which happened when I was 16 and Scott was bit."
"I was coming back from my meeting with your mother," he said, turning to Derek, "when I came across John and Claudia in a diner and overheard them talking about another miscarriage. I approached them and explained everything, offered them a chance of having a child and they accepted. I changed the memories of anyone who knew about the miscarriage and as far as anyone knew, it hadn't happened and a healthy baby boy was born."
"How come you kept it hidden for so long? You could've beaten Gerard in an instant in that basement." Boyd asked
"What basement?" growled out the Alpha, eyes flashing red. Stiles, Erica and Boyd winced, looking at each other before Stiles sighed and answered when another impatient growl filled the air.
"Gerard kidnapped me from the lacrosse game that Friday. I woke up in the basement, enjoyed their accommodations a bit before breaking Erica and Boyd out of there. They were supposed to go straight to you, but got caught by the Alpha Pack along the way. After that, he beat me up some more, before dumping on the side of the road as a message. I walked home and told John what happened, we decided to tell everyone that the other team grabbed me and roughed me up a bit. The bruises only last so long because I cast a glamour. And I kept it hidden because if one hunter knew then the news would spread and best-case scenario, my siblings would find out, worst case Father would hear. I couldn't take that risk."
"You were tortured!?" that particular exclamation came from Lydia; clearly, she was remembering the help he gave her afterwards with driving his jeep into the Kanima/Jackson.
"If you can call it torture, though personally I wouldn't." the original shrugged.
"What do you mean? Stiles, I know he broke at least four of your ribs and cracked your skull, at least. He did more too. How is that not torture?" several gasps and exclamations rang out at Boyd's words.
"I don't call that torture because I've tortured people worse than that. I was raised as a Viking, remember. What Gerard did was not torture, it was an amateur trying to play with the big boys, and failing, badly at that."
"Damn, that means we can't watch Derek should down so many of your plans anymore. You can fight better than us." Isaac pouted. The rest of the pack snorted and snickered.
"Toddlers. Come clean about being a millennium old vampire and all they care about is their entertainment. Toddlers, swear to God." Stiles rolled his eyes, ignoring how the laughter got louder at his words.
"How come you didn't tell us?" Scott asked, puppy eyes in full effect.
"To keep you safe. My family is ruthless, even to each other if in a smaller degree but none of suffer betrayal lightly. If on the off-chance Father found me, then he would relish in killing you for simply being werewolves, whether I got involved in the pack or not. Father kills any werewolf that comes in front of him, their only crime being their species. More than that, Nik had better chance of finding me and he wouldn't have hesitated to use you against me either. When I say my family is ruthless, I mean it. Jack the Ripper, yeah, there was a reason he was never caught. Kol was bored while we were in England and Nik dared him to kill people in a specific way. It was a competition between them to see if Kol could beat Nik's record of kills when Nik posed as a serial killer. When Kol starting attracting too much attention and the risk of Father finding us got even larger, Nik put a dagger in him because he wouldn't stop. I didn't want to bring that on you guys."
There was a horrified silence in the loft and Stiles stood, only to be bombarded with questions. Raising a hand, he reassured them he was going to talk to the Sheriff, keep him in the loop and give them time to think things over, see if they wanted him in the pack after all and speeding out of the loft before they could say anything else.