Chapter 7

She goes after Peter on her own, after he crashes a meeting over territory negotiations with a neighbor pack, undermining Scott's authority in a way that's stupidly reckless at best and dangerously malevolent at worst and almost leaving them with two dozen enemies instead of new allies.

Afterwards, she'll wonder if things would have gone differently if she'd taken Scott or Isaac or her father, but at the time, it seemed like confronting Peter was something she could handle alone.

He brushes off her accusations as if she's being entirely unreasonable and paranoid, but his outrage is so obviously fake that it seems like he doesn't even bother trying to convince her of the innocence of his intentions.

"You wound me. I'm only trying to help."

"If you want–"

Before she can finish the rebuke, he overrides her. "And even if I weren't, what do you think you could possibly do about it? An inexperienced little hunter all on her, thinking she's brave enough to threaten the big bad wolf." He cocks his head and looks her up and down in a way that makes the hair at the back of her neck stand up. "The only way your aunt could harm us was to wait until my family was asleep and then set their house on fire. When it was me against her, face to face, she didn't stand a chance. Remember when I ripped out her throat in front of you? Years and years of experience hunting and killing my kind, and yet she was dead in seconds. Do you really think you'll last longer?"

He sheds his 'harmless Uncle Peter' facade like a second skin he's outgrown, and Allison realizes that this encounter is unlikely to bring them to the tentative agreement she'd hoped they'd be able to reach.

She makes another bid for an amicable solution. "I'm not here to fight."

"You're not? Excellent. Then it will be over even quicker," Peter says, and then he comes charging at her. She reacts instinctively, daggers ready in her hands and spinning around her fingers before she even sees him moving. This is what she's been training for all those months, and just because she didn't want a fight doesn't mean that she's not prepared for it.

Ducking away from him, she manages to slice up his arm from elbow to palm before he knocks one of the daggers out of her hand. Her wrist throbs from the impact of his blow. She grips the second dagger tighter, but before she can make an attack, he jumps at her and she goes down under his weight, breathless and dizzy for a moment when the back of her head hits the ground, the blade dislodged from her fingers.

His face changes right in front of her, becoming feral; eyes electric blue, sharp teeth inches from her throat, ready to tear into her, and the wound in his arm leaves a trail of blood dripping straight across her torso.

"Don't worry, it'll be quick," he tells her. "I'll tell Scott a rogue omega got you and I was just a little too late to stop it. Such a shame, really."

"He's not gonna believe you," she grates out, hand sneaking down between their bodies while he talks.

Peter smiles. It looks grotesque on the wolfed-out face. "I hate to tell you, my dear, but it won't really make a difference in the long run. Not for him, and certainly not for you."

She fires the crossbow from her hip, wolfsbane-laced arrow burying itself in his gut. He roars and staggers backwards, giving her enough room to move, enough to grab the dagger from where it's fallen to the ground and to go for his throat.

His claws lash out, blinding pain exploding in her left shoulder, and when she reels back, he closes in again. She brings the dagger back up before he can react and then there's blood everywhere, all over her, warm and sticky, and Peter collapses into a lump on the ground.

She stares at the fallen body for a moment that stretches too long, narrows down and then speeds up again. He doesn't move. The sea of blood around him is getting bigger and bigger, growing until it reaches her feet, pooling around her boots.

In her dreams, she always looked down at her victim and felt triumph and excitement, the rush of bloodlust. Instead, the sight in front of her makes her sick, her stomach turning at the gaping wound in Peter's throat and the heavy smell of blood in the air. She wants to scream and cry and break down, but she can't, not yet. She remembers watching Derek tear Peter's throat out, in the woods, a year ago. Peter was as dead then as he is now, and he still came back. This time, she'll have to make sure that he'll stay dead.

She chokes back the sob in her throat and goes to get one of Gerard's swords that she knows are still hidden away at the back of their armory.


Her hands are smeared with blood and dirt when she drives home, staining the steering wheel. Her arms hurt from digging the grave and moving Peter's body, and her injured shoulder throbs with pain, and she can't even think about what she's just done.

She killed someone. Peter was a sociopath who forced the bite on Scott and murdered Kate and half a dozen others he deemed responsible for the Hale fire and he may have plotted to steal Scott's Alpha powers, but it doesn't change the fact that she killed him, with her own hands, and it's only now that she fully understands that there's a world of a difference between injuring someone in a fight and actually taking a life. She thought she was sufficiently prepared and hardened by her experiences over the past year, but the truth is, everything she's done so far – capturing Boyd and Erica, going after Derek and Isaac, helping the pack against the Alphas in the mall – it all seems like child's play compared to this.

Allison knows that she should tell the others. They're not going to blame her, they've all had more than a small taste of what Peter was capable of, at least Scott, Stiles and Lydia. But neither of them will truly understand what it cost her because they've never been in her place. Stiles talks too casually about killing, and Scott thinks it can always be avoided, and Lydia's trauma about her past encounters with Peter will make her blind to the fact that, for Allison, it's not about how justified her actions were but about ending someone's, anyone's, life.

What she wants to do is go home and wash herself until she can't feel Peter's blood on her skin anymore. She wants to burn her clothes and pretend tonight never happened, to go to sleep and wake up with no memories of what Peter's body looked like after she cut him in half. The knowledge that this isn't going to happen, no matter how hard she tries, chokes her like hands around her neck, and she realizes that she can't go home to her father like this, not right now. She can't look him in the eye and tell him what she's done.

She pounds against Deucalion's door until he opens. He takes in her appearance, the blood and dirt all over her clothes and her hands, the tear-stained face, and she doesn't even want to know what he thinks when he sees her like this.

He thinks you're weak, coming crying to him because you can't handle being a hunter, a voice inside her snarls. There's another one, quietly, dangerously pleased, telling her, he finally sees you for the killer that you are. Allison squeezes her eyes shut as if that could help her to try and drown them out, and she flinches when she suddenly feels his hand at her arm, pulling her inside.

"I killed Peter Hale," she tells him as soon as the door falls shut behind her, because she needs to say it before the words start rotting her from the inside.

Deucalion seems unfazed by her admission.

"Did you, now? And was it anything like in your dreams?" The way he asks makes her think that he already knows the answer.

Her mind flashes back to the moment she saw his body on the ground with all the blood around him, and she shakes her head quietly.

"You're going to be alright," he promises with a faint smile, and she isn't sure how he can know that. She doesn't feel alright. She doesn't feel like she will ever be alright again. "Come on, let's get you cleaned up."

When she's under the shower, she turns the water so hot that it's almost scalding and she closes her eyes so she won't have to see the rivers of dirty red running into the drain and remember where they came from.

There's a sense of déjà-vu when she steps into the living room with a towel wrapped around her, but it's vague and out of place. That first night when he looked at her, she felt sexy and desirable and powerful. Now her body feels to her like a walking corpse, and rather than lingering on the expanse of naked skin, his eyes are drawn to the wound in her shoulder, four ugly gaping claw marks sluggishly oozing blood.

Deucalion wordlessly pulls her down on the couch and starts cleaning the wound with more care than he ever gave the injuries he left on her when they were sparring. The sting of the disinfectant drives fresh tears into her eyes.

It's going to scar, but maybe that'll be a good thing. It feels right to have a physical reminder of what happened tonight. She looks down at her hands, clean now that the blood and dirt has washed off, nothing remaining that speaks of what she's done. "He was the first person I killed."

"He will hardly be the last." She bristles at the dismissiveness in his tone, and he frowns at her. "Come on, Allison, you don't honestly believe that you can be a hunter and not kill anyone. It doesn't matter how good and kind of a person you think you're supposed to be, you will eventually have to get your hands dirty. Scott has this charmingly noble idea that he can solve every conflict by talking it over, but you and I both know that's highly unrealistic. Eventually, you're going to face a villain you won't be able to placate with words, and you will have to be the one who has to deal with them."

The way he talks about Scott irks her, grating on her nerves and adding to the throbbing pain that's shooting from her shoulder up into her temples. "If Scott had thought like that, you'd be dead – so I wouldn't be so quick to knock Scott's pacifist attitude if I were you."

For a long moment he doesn't answer, busying himself with patching up her wound, and she thinks he's mulling over her words until he finally speaks. "Are you really so naïve to think that it was Scott's little warning that made me reconsider my plans? That when I chose to stay in town, it wasn't because I was biding my time to wait and see when the opportunity would present itself to make a bid for power and make your merry little band of misfits submit to me?"

Her heart stutters and she freezes. In a flash, she can see it all play out in front of her eyes: Deucalion turning on them, the twins falling back in line next to him, Isaac dying as he defends Scott, Scott's guilt, the way it all comes down to her and Deucalion facing each other for real, ready to tear each other apart. She doesn't want that, and she refuses to believe that he wants it.

"You had all the time in the world, and you haven't tried anything yet," she says with more conviction than she feels.

"No, but that had nothing to do with Scott and his ridiculous idealism."

His hand comes to rest on her shoulder, inches from the dressing he put on the wound, and her skin starts tingling, the pain instantly dissolving. When she looks down at his arm, she sees his veins turning black.

She's so distracted that it takes a moment until the meaning of his words has sunk in.

"Oh." It's kind of enormous, and unexpected, and she doesn't quite know what to say to that, so she kisses him. Her lips brush softly against his until his mouth opens under hers and he takes control, cradling her face in his hands and turning the mild touch into something hungry and desperate and animalistic, like he's angry with her for foiling his plans and making him want to be more than just the villain of the story.

He pulls her into his lap and continues plundering her mouth, and she happily lets him. She's too worn out and exhausted – physically, mentally and emotionally – to do anything more than making out tonight, but the way he holds her with large, warm hands resting firmly against her waist and the ferocity with which his lips claim hers are anchoring her. It's not quite enough to make her forget what happened tonight, but if what he said was true, if he's willing to turn a new leaf for her, then maybe she can believe him that she can be a hunter without being like Kate or Gerard.

Maybe killing someone doesn't necessarily make her a killer.

She falls asleep curled up against him, and for the first time since she drowned to save her dad, she doesn't dream.

The End.


That's it! Thanks for sticking with this story until the end, guys. Comments are always very much appreciated.