Author's Note: Thank you so much to samcheese1 for reviewing the last chapter. I hope you're all enjoying the story so far. It's a little discouraging to not hear from more people, especially since this story has so many followers...

Chapter 18

Scott arrived home in dire condition. While he was more or less physically unharmed aside from a few bruised ribs, his brain smarted as though he had been clubbed in the skull with a baseball bat. It was what he imagined the combination of a concussion and a brain tumor might feel like.

Dragging his feet in exhaustion, he managed to shuffle through the threshold of his front door. He was surprised when his mother did not immediately bombard him with questions and admonitions. Instead, the house was quiet as a morgue – even his heightened hearing could not detect any activity.

Cautiously and sensing that something was awry, he climbed the steps up to his bedroom. He pressed his back flat to the hallway wall and carefully rounded his doorway.

What he saw was unimaginable. In all his experience with the bizarre, he had never seen anything like the creature that was crouched over his mother's prone from.

"MOM!" he shouted, abandoning his vigilance.

The reptilian monster snapped its head to look at him, eyes blazing orange. It was covered from head to toe in greenish scales and ended in a long tail that was nearly as long as its body. Atop this layer of scales was a slimy film of some sort of clear secretion. Its mouth opened to hiss at him, revealing a mouthful of pointed, translucent teeth.

While one of its sharp claws was raised above his mother's throat, it seemed to forsake its mission upon seeing him; as soon as Scott went barreling towards it, it slithered off of her and fled out the window.

Scott did not dwell on the horror of what he had witnessed. Instead, he rushed to his mother and examined her. Her eyes were wide open, and she appeared to be completely conscious – however, she could not speak or move her body. Her mouth and features were taut, her fear conveyed only in her dilated pupils.

"Mom!" he called again, retracting his nails and lifting her into a seated position. Indeed, when he studied her face he saw that her brown eyes shimmered in terror, terror at the creature and terror at him. She had seen his irises glow yellow.

So much for explaining myself, thought Scott.

"We've gotta get you to the hospital," he said aloud, lifting her up as though she weighed nothing.

AT SCHOOL

Scott cornered Stiles in the parking lot first thing the next morning.

"I had to take my mom to the ER last night," he told him, voice hoarse from sleeplessness.

Stiles reeled back in shock. "What? Is she okay?" he demanded hastily.

"She's fine… But something got into my house last night."

"What do you mean 'something'?"

"It's gonna sound crazy, but there was some sort of weird creature in my room. I think it was trying to kill my mom, but I interrupted it. The doctors said she was given a dose of paralytic, non-lethal poison, whatever that means."

"What do you mean a 'weird creature'?!"

"I honestly have no idea what it is and I've never seen or heard of anything like it."

"Well, what did it look like?"

"Like some sort of reptile. I think what it gave my mom was venom."

"What do you mean a reptile? Like a snake or like lizard-man?"

"More on the lizard-man side. It's gotta be some sort of shapeshifter."

"Maybe Derek will know," Stiles tried.

"Yeah, maybe. Whatever it is, it's not human and it's not werewolf."

"And it's after your mom?"

"I think it was after me. Either looking for me or trying to hurt me."

"But why?"

"I have no idea."

AT THE APARTMENT

"What you're describing is called a Kanima," said Derek after Scott had regaled the group with his tale. They were in the kitchen, huddled around the island counter.

"A what?" Stiles guffawed.

"A Kanima," Derek repeated. "I've heard of them, but I don't know much more than that. Allegedly, they're like a perversion of the werewolf form."

"What do you mean?" Lyssa asked.

"Sometimes the Bite can make you… different. It doesn't affect everyone the same way. It's not always just a reject/accept sort of deal."

"So you're saying that this is someone who was bitten?" asked Stiles, sharing a furtive and apprehensive look with Amy and Isaac. Mrs. Argent couldn't have changed that quickly? Could she?

"In essence."

Lyssa, who had a laptop open in front of her, said, "Well, Google isn't shedding any light on the matter."

"I wouldn't expect it to," Derek replied. "Like I said, these things are rare. Like happen-a-couple-of-times-in-history rare. If anything's written on them, it's not gonna be on the Internet."

"Where, then?" Amy inquired.

"I dunno. Something in a museum, maybe? Nothing we can get our hands on."

"Don't speak so soon," Allison murmured slowly, examining the countertop. "I might be able to find something out."

"How?" asked Isaac.

"My family has an ancient book like what Derek was talking about. A bestiary, it's called."

Scott, a look of disgust on his face, started, "Isn't that –"

"That's bestiality," Stiles interrupted, anticipating his question. Derek rolled his eyes and Amy stifled a snicker.

"You're sure you can get it?" Derek asked Allison, trying to get the group back on track.

"Yeah, I should be able to. It's Gerard's, but if I can just sneak into his room and take a picture of the right page…"

"Okay, that's what you'll do, then. In the meantime, we need to make sure to travel in groups. If this thing's coming after us, it seems like it wants to pick us off one by one. Stiles, keep an eye on your dad; Scott, keep an eye on your mom. The rest of us don't have any family to worry about."

"Why is this thing coming after us in the first place?" Amy asked worriedly.

"I don't know. Hopefully the bestiary will give us a clue."

"This is the last thing we need," she continued to gripe, "On top of being hunted by the Argents – no offense, Allison – now we have to deal with this?"

"Can we be sure they're not related?" Isaac added.

"I think I would know if my family had anything to do with something like that," Allison bristled, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Using the supernatural to hunt the supernatural goes against everything hunters stand for," Lyssa added. "They're probably unrelated."

"Maybe you should ask your family to hunt this thing instead of us, then," Isaac suggested, glaring.

Allison shifted her weight from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable.

"She's doing everything she can," Scott defended, sensing this.

"Allison," Amy began, "have your parents said anything recently about other hunters?"

"No, why?"

Amy cast a skeptical glance to Lyssa, who was still apparently absorbed in her web search. "Lyssa," she said, "don't you think it's weird that we haven't heard anything about the Grimms?"

Lyssa looked up from the screen, unfazed. "Maybe they met with Argents and no one told Allison. Just because we haven't caught wind of them yet doesn't mean they're not coming."

"You'd think with this new thing in town they'd be all over it, though," Amy went on.

"Maybe they met with the Argents and the Argents said they could handle it," she shrugged. Stiles and Scott shared a suspicious look, which didn't slip past her notice. "Look," she sighed, "I don't know any more than you guys do. All I know is they were in the next town over. Maybe something big came up somewhere else – we're not exactly tuned into supernatural world news, are we? Something could be going down in some other part of the country and we would have no idea about it. There are more than just werewolves in the world, as I think we've pretty firmly established."

This didn't seem like such an unreasonable excuse, and it was something Amy had never really considered. Her mother and Ian were surely somewhere else, so why couldn't there be something momentous going on outside of Beacon Hills? She shuddered at the thought – imagining something more extreme than what was going on in this small town made her skin crawl. Was Beacon Hills really nothing more than a drop in the proverbial ocean of supernatural occurrences?

"Still, judging by what Derek said, hunting a Kanima would be a one-in-a-lifetime gig," Stiles noted.

"Well, maybe we'll be seeing them soon, then. But I wouldn't hope for it," Lyssa snapped, putting the kibosh on the discussion.

THE NEXT DAY, AT LUNCH

"I got the picture," Allison announced to Stiles, Scott, Isaac, and Amy, sitting down beside her boyfriend. "The only problem is," she continued, "it's written in archaic Latin. I tried Google Translate, but it was pretty hard to make sense of. Something about it looking for a friend…"

"Well, anyone know archaic Latin?" Stiles asked the group, a sarcastic drawl in his tone.

Amy seemed to have an epiphany. "If anyone does, I think I might know who."

"Who?" Isaac asked.

Allison suddenly arrived at the same conclusion. "Lydia," she answered.

Amy nodded solemnly. "Let's Skype her after school."

"Good idea."

The five sat in silence for several moments, before Stiles said, "Something fishy is definitely going on with Lyssa."

"Tell me about it," Amy agreed in frustration, leaning back in her chair. "But what?"

"Why does Derek trust her?" Scott piped in with a question of his own.

"Beats me," said Amy, once again sounding like her friends were preaching to the choir. She was glad that at least now they were coming to the conclusion she had arrived at long ago.

"I don't know if he trusts her, per se," Isaac interjected. "But our numbers are low and she is a werewolf, which makes her a natural ally."

"Yeah, but she came out of nowhere," Scott said.

"And what do we know about her really," Allison added.

"She's just an omega looking for a pack," Isaac said. "Deaton did warn us that they would be attracted to Beacon Hills now that Derek is an Alpha."

"Still, something weird is going on," Stiles stated. "I just hope we figure it out before it becomes an issue."

AFTER SCHOOL, IN THE LIBRARY

The majority of the pack soon made their way to the library after classes had ended and grouped around one of the computers. Allison opened Skype and soon enough Lydia's familiar visage appeared on screen. She looked as beautiful as they remembered, with her red locks coiffed to perfection and an Hermès scarf tied around her delicate neck.

After everyone had greeted her with nostalgic grins, she said, "I got your e-mail – what did you say this was for again?"

"A history project on South American folklore," Allison lied easily. "Were you able to read it?"

"Yeah, I sent you a translated version. You were right that Google Translate really did a bang-up job. I'll read you what I got out of it:

'Like the wolf, its power is greatest at the moon's peak.

Like the wolf, the Kanima is a social creature, but where the wolf seeks a pack, the Kanima seeks a master.

The Kanima, a weapon of vengeance, is used to carry out the bidding of its master. The Kanima was once used by a South American priest, who took it upon himself to rid his village of all murders. The bond between master and servant grew stronger, until the will of the master became that of the Kanima's and whomever the priest deemed unworthy, the Kanima served his vengeance.

The Kanima is a mutation of the werewolf gene that cannot fully transform until it resolves that in its past which manifests itself.'

This is some weird voodoo nonsense – I tried looking this up online, but there wasn't anything. How did the teacher even know to assign this? And where did the passage come from?"

"I found an old book in my grandpa's stuff," Allison explained. "I chose to write about this myth before I knew it would be impossible to find any more info about it."

"Oh," Lydia replied slowly. "Well, good luck. Stay in touch, guys!"

"When are you coming back to visit?" Stiles asked.

"I'm coming back this summer, before college starts," she said, "so only a few more months. I miss you all."

"We miss you too," Scott said solemnly.

She gave them a melancholy smile. "Well, I need to finish my homework," she said finally with a yawn. "It's like ten PM here and that translation took a while. Talk to you soon."

The others bid their goodbyes and thanks, before severing the connection.

Author's Note: Please review!