A/N: This chapter was so intense to write, I think I scared myself a bit. Didn't quite turn out like I expected. I just love writing nightmares, don't you? Make sure to read every word—pretty much everything is important in this chapter. Leave a review! Oh, and I fixed some mistakes from the previous chapter. Thanks ya'll!

Brace yourselves

-Kenxi

Lydia was having another nightmare.

As she raced forward, her adrenaline pumping like crazy, she could see something a short way ahead, chasing a young woman. The girl wasn't even screaming because of how hard she was running. Lydia could feel it.

In the midst of her blind running, she was at least aware that there was something missing. Like not knowing if you locked the house kind of feeling. Still, she tried to ignore it as she proceeded.

Suddenly, Lydia stopped running. This felt wrong. She wound her arms tight around her body, aware of the chill in the night air. Fog had settled on the ground, the moon casting an eerie glow upon the scene before her.

The graveyard. Whatever that monster was, it was chasing the girl into the graveyard. Up until this moment, Lydia had felt an unknown need to keep running. To follow the beast and the girl. Now, however, she was wondering why.

Why was it so important she follow them? Why did she feel like she had a somewhat connection with the strange animal? Something was wrong here. Very wrong.

You're dreaming.

Lydia took in a sharp breath at the thought. This wasn't real.

And just like that, everything stopped. The air froze in the atmosphere, the birds stopped rustling in the trees, the breeze stopped playing with her hair, the beast stopped chasing beauty. Everything just stopped.

A slight gasp slipped from Lydia's red lips as she took it all in. For a moment she stood in the timeless space, still thinking and processing the world even as it ceased to progress toward any future. Then, letting the air fall from her mouth, things continued just as they had before.

She needed to follow them.

As soon as the thought reached consciousness, she appeared right where that thing was, several feet forward, as if she had teleported with her mind. She appeared right as the innocent girl screamed. Right as the monster knocked her headfirst down into a gravestone. Never, in a dream, had Lydia felt the loss of life so tangibly before that moment. It was almost as difficult to stand as when Allison had died. At least back then she had been sitting down, not standing.

The killer turned to face her then, and Lydia caught a dimmed view of it. Burning yellow eyes like in an old lantern. Not warm or mysterious like Scott's had been before he'd become an Alpha. Those were more golden than yellow. But these…the fire in them seemed to burn a hole right through Lydia's chest, and she felt herself shaking in fear. Fur covered the animal completely, but it was short and was missing some patches due to scars and new wounds, creating a gruesome image.

There was intelligence in its eyes, however, and she knew that it was not just an animal, but also a man. There was also something strangely familiar about it, just on the tip of her tongue. Its face, then, seemed to curl up in some sort of twisted grin or snarl, and then it ran off into the dark night.

Lydia waited for a minute to be sure it wasn't coming back to kill her, and then she slowly walked over to the dead woman sprawled awkwardly on the ground. She knelt down next to her body and felt tears roll down her cheeks at the thought of the future this human being had lost too quickly. It wasn't fair.

Blinking rapidly, Lydia swallowed hard and saw the headstone nearby which had been what caused the blow to the girl's head, resulting in her ultimate death.

Claudia Stilinski.

Lydia jerked away as if she'd been burned. This was Stiles' mother's grave. What kind of sick coincidence…?

It's not a coincidence, a thought came to Lydia's mind.

This was making even less sense than before.

"Lydia!" A voice rang out in the silent night, penetrating her thoughts. She whipped around, wiping the tears from her face.

She blinked in confusion. "Stiles? What are you doing here in the middle of the night?" Surely he wasn't coming to visit his mother at this hour.

Stiles was looking at the dead girl in horror. "I did this, Lydia. I killed her."

"What? No!" Lydia shook her head fiercely and tried to explain. "There was some sort of animal out here, not a werewolf, I don't think, but it—"

"It was me, Lydia," Stiles brought his head up and his eyes filled with tears. "I'm the monster. I killed her and all those other people. Well, maybe not me personally, but," his voice shook, "I am controlling it."

Even as she recalled the familiar connection she had felt with the beast, the connection she recognized as being the one she shared with Stiles, Lydia refused to believe it. "How can you even say that? None of this is your fault, Stiles. It's just something we need to figure out again. Like we always do. This isn't you, Stiles."

A grin. A cold, slowly spreading, poisonous grin curled its way into all of the good in Stiles' face. And just like that, everything making Stiles who he was disappeared, a demon-like creature taking his place before Lydia. The pseudo Stiles looked hard into her eyes with a glint in his own. Just as the brown in them began to glow yellow.

"It is now."

Suddenly, his body began to form into the monster she'd previously encountered, its yellow eyes burning once again right through her. Already, she could sense that it was true. That somehow, by some cruel twist of fate, Stiles was connected to this thing, to the murders.

And, as Stiles gained this strong connection to the monster, Lydia's own connection to him shattered as easily as dropping a glass. With her banshee gifts, she had a similar connection to everyone close to her. Losing it was deafening in the silent night. It felt like all of the air had been punched from her stomach, and she gasped for oxygen, falling to her knees before the horrible creature. Lydia could no longer feel any presence from the Stiles she knew, the Stiles she loved. Almost as if he'd never existed at all.

An open claw swung for her face, but just as Lydia brought her hands up to protect herself, she remembered something long forgotten.

This was a dream.

00000

Lydia couldn't even scream. Not a banshee scream, but one for her own witnessed horrors within the nightmare. She choked instead on her broken sobs and folded her arms over her stomach, bringing her knees up to her chest as well for good measure. Had anyone been around to see her, they likely would have called an ambulance or Eichen House. Because why else would someone be randomly crying like she was unless there was something wrong with them?

She'd had nightmares for a while now, ever since she found herself a banshee ages ago. Of course she didn't exactly mention them to anybody—didn't want more worry than she deserved—but that was just another down side of her gifts. And they were gifts, not curses, she forced herself to believe.

Back when she was dating Aiden, Lydia actually did tell him about her nightmares sometimes. Doing so would make him kinder when he had something to be kind about. She had liked that about Aiden. He acted so tough sometimes, but Lydia believed that it was really just his way of saying he cared.

No nightmare had ever felt like this before.

It took a couple minutes for her to calm herself, to breathe, and to think about what had just happened. Lydia was positive this wasn't a normal dream. There was no way it was. Absolutely not. And at the same time it definitely wasn't real. Stiles wasn't a monster.

Shakily, she sat up and opened her eyes for the first time and immediately froze in her movements. She wasn't curled up in her bed at home.

Lydia was outside.

Not just outside, either. Looking around, Lydia placed her surroundings as being in her dream as well. She was a few yards from the cemetery. From the murder she'd just seen in the dream.

This was less surreal, however. There wasn't nearly as much fog covering the ground, even though there was some. The chill in the air made her shiver, and she retained focus. Same props her dream had, but now filled with realism.

Still, it had all seemed so real. More real than a normal dream. After she woke up from normal dreams, Lydia could rarely remember any details of anything in her subconscious. Just the overall ideas stayed with her. This time, however, she could recall the still existing fear as Stiles turned into that horrible thing, the look in his eyes prior to his transformation, the sharp, desperate scream of the young woman right before her violent and untimely death, Stiles' very presence being torn from her mind. It was all clear as day.

Stiles.

She had to call him. Right then. She needed to check to see if he was still there, still him. Even now she could feel the pain of her lost sense of him. The sense that was still gone.

Somehow, by sheer, dumb luck, her cellphone sat undisturbed in a pocket of her nightgown. Lydia fumbled for it, hands shaking still from the memories of her nightmare. Numbly, she hit Stiles' speed dial, praying he would answer.

The phone stopped ringing, and Stiles' voice sounded in her ear, "Hey, what's—"

"Stiles!" Lydia practically cried out. Tears stung her eyes again, thinking about losing him forever. Somehow she composed herself enough to keep her voice strong. "What happened? Are you alright?" She held her breath, waiting for his answer.

He spoke slowly on the other end. "Lydia, pleasure as always." A hint of sarcasm frosted his tone. Lydia almost began crying, again, in relief.

"Not funny, Stiles," she said, blinking fast. Words fell out of her mouth before she could even properly think of what she was saying. "I felt something like ten minutes ago and I couldn't find my phone and I didn't know what was going on—"

Well, it was sort of true.

Stiles sighed on the other end. "Calm down, Lydia. Everything's fine." He paused, and panic flared up in Lydia once again. "Well," he said, "sort of. We do need to talk, though. What happened?" Now he sounded worried. "You didn't scream, did you?"

Lydia remembered waking up, a scream in her throat that never came out. "What? No! No, it wasn't like that exactly. It…." It felt like you died, she wanted to say. But truthfully, Lydia didn't even know what just happened—she had merely called Stiles in a moment of fear. She swallowed. "It felt like our connection was ripped apart. Like you were no longer you." Or there at all, Lydia thought to herself. Wait, did she say that out loud?

"Like I was dead?"

Crap. She did say that out loud. Repairs, repairs. "No!" In a way, though, it was. "Well, not really. It was different. I can't explain. But you, sir, are going to have a lot of explaining to do once I see you." Yeah, explaining why she suddenly was no long emotionally connected to him.

"Of course, Lyds," he breathed out. "I'll see you in a few hours. Bye."

"Wait, Stiles!" Lydia yelled, but he had already broken the connection—the second one broken between them that day.

She groaned into her hands, dropping the phone on her lap as she slumped back onto the ground. She hadn't really told him anything. He hadn't really told her anything. And now she was in the middle of Beacon Hills in her sleepwear, cold and crying and distraught from her so very real nightmare. How did she even get herself into these messes?

Lydia knew she could call back, but it was in the middle of the night, or something like it based off of the darkness. Anyhow, she knew this conversation would be better face to face. Especially since she didn't even know what was going on.

It was dark, nearly black where she sat in the damp grass. Animals skittered in the branches of trees and bushes. How on earth did she even get all the way out here without anyone noticing? Obviously Lydia had sleepwalked. It wasn't the first time, she remembered with a shiver. Before she walked back home, though, she needed to check Claudia Stilinski's gravestone. Maybe her dream meant nothing. Maybe it didn't. Lydia was going to find out one way or another.

The thin nightgown she wore did just about nothing against the morning (or was it night?) cold. Still, she walked against it in her bare feet, following the sound of her beating heart toward the cemetery.

It wasn't often that she went down there, with her ability and all with the dead. She got…feelings about some strong deaths, and it was unsettling. This time was no different as she passed gravestone after gravestone of people who died too young, or they didn't want to leave, or they were taken from the world so horribly that Lydia could feel their pain and shock of it all. For a place of the dead, everything was so…alive.

Lydia knew where Mrs. Stilinski's grave was. Never would she forget the funeral or the destruction in Stiles' eyes as he watched one of few people he loved get put in the ground. Even before she really knew him, she understood that much. Scott had been there too, his hand around his best friend's shoulder as they mourned together for the woman who'd been a mother to both of them. To Lydia, the woman had always been so kind to her. Lydia could remember meeting the Stilinski's after she and Stiles had met, playing in the sandbox when they were around four, before she became the popular school witch and Stiles the weird, quirky kid who battled her intellect. The scene where the funeral of the fun-loving woman took place stood still, several feet ahead in the darkness.

Nearing the space, it was hard to see much at all, courtesy of the night. But the closer she did get, the more the rods in her eyes made out the prone form on the ground near Mrs. Stilinski's gravestone on the grass under the blanket of fog. Lydia could feel her heart pound even harder in her chest as her nightmare was literally coming true.

The girl's dead eyes stared at nothing from the ground. Blood stuck to her hair and plastered onto her face from the blow she'd taken, ending her life.

What felt like very distantly, Lydia heard herself scream into the darkness.

A/N: Gah, this was a creepy one. I made a lot of references to a lot of things in here, so let me know if any of you caught them! Do you think Stiles is actually the monster in Beacon Hills? Or merely a pawn? The whole thing with his broken connection to Lydia is odd…. Please write a review! Your thoughts mean so much to me. Yes, your thoughts. Thank you!

-Kenxi