Chapter 54: Declassified Original Vampire Hybrid Survival Guide

Damon was starting to threaten anyone that breathed too close to him if they didn't hurry and start the meeting soon when Derek called everyone into the front room. Stiles had woken just in time to hear the vampire compare all the drama to a poorly written CW show. He also noticed the drops of dried drool on his chin, and the matching ones on Erica's jacket. Coughing and stretching, Stiles pretended not to notice, and pretended not to notice how Erica was pretending not to notice.

The room was crowded and the occupants inside didn't exactly help matters. Tyler and Caroline came in a strategic amount of time apart, both claiming opposite corners. Lydia stomped over to join Caroline when Jackson tried to sit next to her. Scott leaned on the couch, but not-so-casually wandered away when Stiles stiffened. Most of the wolves were keeping their distance from Peter, most everyone avoided Damon, and Chris Argent was trying to stay away from all supernatural beings present.

"Look," Derek began, bargaining a breath, "I get that not all of us get along. We all have - history," he eyed Peter, "but if we want to survive what's coming, we have to put anything we're feeling aside."

"We worked together to save our friends from the Alphas," Stefan added, "and we can work together again to do this."

"A better plan for survival would be to pack up and leave town while you still can," Damon shrugged.

"Does your boyfriend ever get tired of being a broken record?" Erica cocked her head toward Elena, her eyes rolling.

"He's right though," Rebekah sighed, crossing her arms, "as much as I hate to admit it. Get the humans you love out of town, by any means necessary. And if anyone is even considering running, best do it now rather than in the middle of battle and putting everyone at risk."

"I still don't understand why you're helping us," Elena shook her head. "You've caused just as much damage and death as your brother."

"Don't ever," Rebekah was nose to nose with the girl before finishing her second word, "compare me to Niklaus. I've spilled my fair share of blood, including yours. But I am nothing like him."

"She's right though," Stefan lowered his head. "You said you want to help but you never explained why. You could take Matt and run."

"And I would," Rebekah nodded, "if he didn't so stupidly wish to stay."

"That is what's stopping you from leaving?" Damon laughed, waving a hand at the busboy. "What's convincing you to turn against big bro, despite all that 'always and forever' crap? Donovan ?"

"I won't have him stay without me and get himself killed," she glared at the vampire. "And I won't make him leave either. For too much of my life, choice, has been taken away from me. My parents forcing me to become a monster. My brother choosing who is and isn't good enough for me, killing any who weren't - which, by the way, was all of them. Niklaus daggering me again and again. Bloody Silas tricking Elijah into giving him the cure when he thought he was giving it to me, robbing me of the choice, the chance, to become human again." She turned to take Matt's hand. "I won't take choice away from someone that I care about."

"Huh," Damon eyed the pair, bouncing his brow "must've been some summer."

"Speaking of why people are helping," Stiles gestured at Peter. "Why the heck are you still here? You literally only care about yourself."

"You just might be surprised to know that that wasn't always true," the werewolf's jaw locked. "Look where we are."

"Yeah, in the room where you killed my aunt while you made me watch," Allison clenched her fists.

"In the house," Peter continued, darting sharp eyes at the girl and then back, "where your aunt burned my family alive. We were happy here. We were a family here."

"Family?" Stiles squinted. "You killed Derek's sister, and then tried to kill him! They're your family."

"Haven't we had this conversation before?" Peter threw up his arms. "I had been in a coma . I had little to no control. Those weren't my best days. Does no one listen to me?"

"No," both Stiles and Derek answered together.

"Look," Stiles glanced at Derek and then the others, "we know all he cares about is power and survival. Why wait for him to sell us out to this new big bad when things get tough?"

Derek sighed and shook his head, taking a few steps toward Stiles.

"He helped us with Jackson. He helped us save everyone from the Alphas. I want to believe that he wants to be here. To help." The Alpha turned back toward back toward his uncle. "And, if he tries anything to hurt us, I'll kill him. Again."

"Am I the only one in this room who hasn't also killed someone in this room?" Isaac whispered.

"No," Stiles smirked, "but you did try to help put Lydia down when you all thought she was the kanima. Ooh, fun game. Quick, show of hands. Who hasn't tried to kill someone here?"

"Can we move onto strategizing, please?" Jeremy stood.

"No, this is good," Argent stepped forward. "You can't have any of this clouding your judgement. Suspicion, grudges, old wounds, feuds, secrets, doubt, whatever you have going on, it needs to be put on the table now, or shoved so far down it can't even taste daylight. This isn't some next fight. This is about to be war. And in war, every single one of us has to be focused, clear minded, and singularly united. Or we don't stand a chance."

"Rebekah," Allison took a breath, "when Klaus gets here, what will he do first?"

"His first move?" Rebekah lifted a singular brow. "It won't be to come. Not right away. As I said, he's been watching. Waiting. He'll make contact with the Alphas, if he hasn't already done so. They most likely took Tyler for leverage or a gift, either once they heard he would be making his way here or after he spoke to them."

"Must be why they took Elena when they thought she was Katherine." Stefan offered up, glancing at his former girlfriend. "You said Deucalion would search your memories for her."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," Rebekah grinned, eyes twinkling in that same way they did before she ripped out someone's throat. "Have you ever met a man that Katherine Pierce didn't try to manipulate into falling madly in love with her?'

"Deucalion," Tyler snorted, "and Katherine?"

"It makes sense why he always wanted to see her in my mind," Elena shuddered, rubbing her neck at the thought of those claws piercing her skin day after day.

Damon saw her shake and moved to put a hand on his girlfriend's arm. Caroline saw Stefan shift and frowned.

"So big bad scary alpha leader is just a lovesick pup pathetically watching home movies of his long lost girlfriend through someone else's head?" Damon laughed.

"Can we please stop talking about Katherine?" Caroline bent her head back. "I feel like it's Bloody Mary. We say her name enough times and that bitch will show up and ruin anything we have planned."

"Klaus and an ex-boyfriend?" Damon huffed. "She'll be as far away from this town as possible."

"But we should make a list and plan for any allies Klaus has that might turn up," Chris interjected.

"The only allies Niklaus has are the ones that he forces into loyalty, and of course my hopelessly impossible other brother who still thinks that Nik can be saved somehow."

"And when Elijah shows up to have Klaus' back?" Damon challenged. "What will you do?"

"The plan is to take out the Alphas and put Klaus down, not Elijah," Rebekah stepped toward the vampire.

"But if he gets in the way of that plan," Damon matched her movement.

"No one is to lay a hand on Elijah," Rebekah growled.

"And if he lays a hand on us?" Damon countered, bringing himself so close to the Original that their faces nearly touched.

Stiles would've kept paying attention for the sheer entertainment factor if he thought that this was going to turn into a fight. With so many supernaturals around, though, someone was bound to break it up. Instead, the boy slipped out his cell phone and started ordering pizzas online with Derek's credit card number he had memorized after the Alpha had sent him on a food run for everyone once. He clicked on three of each different kind of "specialty" pizza. Was anyone on this new expanded team vegan? The veggie pizza looked disgusting to him, but he threw on a few, plus some regular cheese pies, a stack of boxes of breadsticks, cheesy bread, garlic bread, pretty much any carb he found on the menu. When Erica noticed what he was doing, she swiped the phone and added wings and fries. Why did a pizza place even have French fries? Isaac was the next to notice, fighting for the phone and picking out a triple cheese and meatball sub. He added a turkey, salami, bacon, ham, and pork sub for Boyd, who smiled and nodded in approval when Isaac showed him the screen. Stiles just rolled his eyes and yanked his phone back, stifling a laugh to seem irritated before selecting some random subs to finish out the order. Scott watched the exchange in silence, still half paying attention to the others talking, but not once taking his gaze off the face of his friend. Argent had been right. They couldn't go into whatever was coming their way with anything holding them back or keeping them apart. And he couldn't face this without his best friend at his side.

"How much time do we have before your brother comes to kill us all?" Cora crossed her arms, speaking for the first time in the meeting.

"Klaus is anything if not unpredictable. His moods and plans change with the weather. I'll keep tabs with Elijah as best I can without revealing my true purpose. The most important thing, is that he can't realize that we know he's coming. It'll ruin any plans we have of catching him, or the Alphas, off guard."

"That means we keep up appearances," Derek nodded. "School, jobs. Get people you love out of town if you want to, but do it quietly. We can't have them getting suspicious."

"You gave us the same speech when we were looking for the Alphas," Jackson cut in. "But this guy is apparently 10x stronger than all of them combined. Aren't we safer staying together?"

"We will be," Stefan nodded at Derek, "as much as we can. Just like we did before."

"Stick in pairs or groups," Chris agreed. "Stay in contact at all times. Each of us should have someone else that we check in with at regular intervals. If someone goes radio silent, we assume the worst and meet at a predetermined safe area. We patrol, but we do it smart. I have been a hunter my entire life. But I never let it stop me from having a life. Otherwise, what are we fighting for? And Rebekah is right. We can't let the enemy know we are onto them. We have plans. We're making plans. We stick to those and we can survive this."

"We mentioned allies of Klaus." Scott piped up. "What about whatever is killing virgins? Is that related to your brother?"

"Who's killing virgins?" Caroline blinked a few times and shook her head.

"Stiles figured it out," Scott looked over at his friend, only for Stiles to glance away. "Heather, the girl in the woods, the kid Lydia found at the pool. They were all virgins."

"How did we not know about this?" Tyler looked between the two boys.

"What?" Stiles flailed his hands. "It all just happened. There's been a lot going on, if you haven't noticed. I told Scott and Lydia. Didn't realize I had to file a report to the Supernatural Justice League."

"Why virgins?" Elena stepped in. "Magic?"

"That would be the logical answer," Deaton nodded. "Many forms of magic require different versions of virgin sacrifices or blood."

"I mean, we thought the Alphas had a witch on their side," Jeremy added. "Only reason why locator spells and tracking wouldn't work to find them."

"Do we know any witches that would be willing to help?" Matt shrugged.

"I could barely find one willing to perform locator spells for me," Jeremy sighed. "And against Klaus? I don't think so."

"Oh, but maybe we don't need to find a witch," Damon strolled across the room. "Maybe we have our very own little Harry Potter, right, here."

"Damon, what the hell are you talking about?" Stefan leaned forward.

Stiles was already very much off his phone and glaring at the vampire. His entire body was wound tight like the pulled string on one of his mystery boards, vibrating at his personal pitch of anxiety and anger.

"I'm talking," Damon danced closer to the boy, "about him."

Stiles felt every single pair of eyes fall on him, but refused to look anywhere but at the vampire that had just taken his secret and tossed it out in the open for all of his friends to see. Jaw clenched, they could watch as his cheekbone tried to carve through his skin. As his nostrils flared and his face flushed. They could probably hear his stupid anxious heart pounding. Probably smell the sweat beading on his back.

Scott was the first to break the stunned silence, speaking the boy's name once, twice.

"What is he talking about?"

"Nothing," Stiles sniffed and sat back. "I have no idea."

"Come on," Damon laughed, "you're in a room full of werewolves and vampires who can tell you're lying. It's time they knew."

"And, what?" Stiles launched off of the sofa. "You had to be the one to tell them?"

"Well, someone had to."

"We agreed not to."

"Yeah, because you can't handle the pressure!"

"No!" Stiles threw a finger in the vampire's face. "You wanted to wait because you didn't want to get Elena's hopes up for nothing. Because you thought I was going to fail at it. And if I didn't, then you had your own personal secret weapon! Why did I ever think I could trust you?"

"I was trying to train you." Damon waved a hand flippantly. "It's your own fault if you were stupid enough to trust me."

"You knew?" Elena interjected. "You knew and didn't tell any of us?"

"So did the Little Gilbert," Damon rolled his eyes, "and the Doc. Her too." He jutted a thumb toward Lydia.

"Jeremy?" Elena narrowed her eyes at her brother, while Scott looked to Deaton.

"We didn't say anything because -"

"Because I asked them not to!" Stiles cut the hunter off. "Because it wasn't working! I made lights flicker and candles burn and some stuff float around my bedroom a few times."

"Your locator spell worked." Jeremy replied.

"Locator spell? For who?" Caroline asked.

"The witch I reached out to couldn't find the Alphas with a locator spell." Jeremy explained. "Stiles tried. Didn't work. So we tried one on one of us to see if he could even perform the spell. Or to see if there was some sort of magic block in Beacon Hills. It worked."

"It was one spell!" Stiles waved an arm. "One spell that you said was like Magic 101, preschool spell level. You really think I can do anything to help against super werewolf-vampire boss battle villain?"

"So," Scott said slowly, the quiet single syllable cutting through the raised voices and rage. "It's true. He's not lying. You - you can do magic?"

"Way to keep up," Damon huffed.

"Since when?" Derek crossed his arms, a crease in his brow that fell somewhere between concerned and suspicious.

"Just this summer," Stiles sighed.

"How?" Scott shook his head.

"He got sick," Stefan squinted. "You said you got sick from the vampire blood."

"I had my suspicions," Deaton added, "with the mountain ash. A human has to be the one to wield it. And the power of belief is what ignites it. But Stiles had been out of the ash. There was a whole gap in the circle. It shouldn't have worked. But it did. Mountain ash is a form of magic, so it was possible, maybe. But not likely. I believe Stiles has had the potential for magic for quite some time now. His exposure to the supernatural world began to stir the potential of magic inside of him, but it was the vampire blood that truly awoke it."

"But Bonnie came into her powers a few years ago and it didn't hurt her, or put her in a coma?" Elena questioned.

"From what I understand from what I've been told of your friend, her family line practiced magic for centuries. As for Stiles, to have such power, stifled for so long? So many generations of it laying dormant, being driven deeper and deeper down? The magic didn't just wake up, it exploded. His body wasn't prepared. To use magic can cause great physical pain."

"We've seen," Jeremy bowed his head.

"So you can see how the power coming forth like that would have affected him."

"So your family -?" Elena prompted.

"Had no clue," Stiles shook his head, looking to Lydia.

"I did some digging for him. Well, for my curiosity too. There was this fire back in 1806 that burned a Polish town nearly to the ground. This one maid was known for her connection to witchcraft, so everyone thought she did it. She was arrested and kept in the dungeons of the very city she was accused of almost burning down. She stayed there for years before she was burnt at the stake. Of course, she was already dead when they burned her. The executioner apparently strangled her before the fire was even set."

"What does some lady getting killed have to do with him?" Jackson interrupted.

"Because," Lydia bit off, "Stiles' whole ancestral history begins in that very same city. His earliest known documented ancestors were from there. Specifically, there is a birth record from while the woman was imprisoned in the dungeons. No parents listed. Just the baby, taken in by a church. And then another. One baby during her time in prison, in the same city, maybe a coincidence. But two? No way. Especially when there were rumors of the things that the guards were doing to her in that dungeons, and the rumors of the two babies she had while there."

"Why does this sound familiar?" Chris spoke up.

"Because you've read it," she replied, "in the bestiary."

"What?" Allison perked up. "Stiles' ancestor is in there?"

"Barbara Zdunk." Lydia nodded.

"Why would the bestiary have an entry on a witch?" Allison shook her head.

"There was never any real proof that she actually set fire on the town, or why she was the sole suspect," Lydia continued. "Some people believed it was because she was an adult woman who had a teenage boyfriend. At least, that's what history books say. The bestiary says something else."

"He wasn't her boyfriend," Chris interjected. "The boy was a werewolf." The hunter sighed, eyes clouding as he searched his memory. "Back then, there was a war going on."

"The Napoleonic Wars," Derek chimed in.

"The what?" Isaac squinted.

"Seriously?" Peter shook his head. "What are they teaching you in schools these days?"

"You're like what," Erica chuckled, "only a decade older than Derek?"

"The Napoleonic Wars," Deaton answered patiently, "were a series of conflicts between France and the shifting alliances of other European powers that lead to a brief French control over most of Europe."

"They started with the War of the First Coalition in the 1790s," Rebekah contributed, "and engaged nearly all European nations in a bloody struggle, one that also spilled over into Egypt, America, and South America. As for Poland, well, it was all about control. Russia, France, Austria, Prussia, all wanted a piece of the Polish pie. But there was another grab for power going on, another war. What you now call Poland was home to several old packs of werewolves and vampires. There were a few vampires in the Prussian royal family, a bunch of impulsive children if you ask me, so they went about wiping out the wolves."

"All except one," Lydia amended. "When the vampires discovered that a local and powerful witch, Barbara, was protecting the last werewolf of the local packs, the vampires found where she was hiding him, and killed him."

"She set fire to the town out of revenge, planning to kill the vampires while they stayed inside during the daylight." Rebekah sighed. "But she was mad with grief over the boy she had grown to consider as a son. The fire went out of the control, ravaging the town and killing hundreds of innocent humans. The vampires who survived agreed to work with hunters and the witch's own coven to take her down and keep her imprisoned. But her magic was too strong and they could not hold her forever. The vampires and hunters wanted to kill her, of course, but the witches refused to allow it. They agreed to contain her, but not harm her. When werewolves from other packs in other countries heard the story, they came to try to free the witch, and kill as many vampires as they could in exchange for what they did to the boy, and the other wolves. But with both vampires and hunters standing together united, and the vampires in a place of political power, the werewolves didn't stand a chance. Even when most of the witches joined them after being betrayed by the others. The war between wolves and vampires ended and, to make a statement, they planned to execute Barbara, publicly."

"Our records indicate that when she was taken out of the spelled room to be brought to the stake, Barbara began chanting. So the hunter escorting her, strangled her." Chris finished. "The hunters had struck a deal to stop the witch to save the town. They had always planned on taking the vampires out once it was done though."

"Let me guess," Damon snorted, "that went swimmingly."

"The vampires wiped them out almost the moment after Barbara was burned. The only reason we have any record of it in the bestiary is because a couple fled town."

There was a long silence where no one know exactly what to say.

"So," Jackson cocked his head at Stiles, "show us."

"What?" Stiles cracked his teeth on the last letter of the word.

"Come on, show us some magic. Do something witchy."

"It doesn't work like that." Stiles huffed, sinking as deep as he could into the couch cushions.

"Just a sample," Jackson pushed. "I need to see this for myself. 'Cause honestly, I don't believe you, Stiles, has magic."

"Believe it," Lydia snapped. "I've seen it."

"How much time were you spending with him this summer?" Jackson's mocking tone turned icy.

"I swear, Jackson Whittemore, if you are about to imply what I think you are, I will slap you so hard that you turn back into a lizard."

"Can you, you know, show us something?" Boyd questioned quietly, more curious than unkind.

Stiles' phone buzzed, and he hastily tugged it out from his sweatshirt pocket while everyone stared.

"Yeah," he answered, "creepy, burned, abandoned looking house that looks like it should be in a horror movie? Yupp. That's the one. Just leave it all on the porch. Thanks." Stiles shoved the phone back into his pocket as he stood, glaring around the room at his audience. With a mumbled word and a flick of his hand, the front door burst open and they all spun toward it. "Pizza's here," he announced, crossing the room and heading toward the back, "you're welcome."

A/N: I know that we've been over Stiles' ancestor's story before, but I wanted to give it a bit more historical context, and I figured it had been like 30 chapters since then so I'd give a quick refresher.