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The boy was something. He just couldn’t put his finger on what yet. He obviously didn’t have a wolf’s enhanced senses. He would scowl if others were speaking away from him but within sight, no matter what they were saying. He couldn’t see well in the dark at all, which led to many instances of tripping over large objects and muttering loud curses, indicating that he didn’t inherit any preternatural grace or balance from anything. He was lithe, lean, but physical activity definitely tired him out, so natural extended stamina was definitely not part of his package. He seemed to gain stamina in the same way humans did it—practice and exercise. He flailed and fidgeted, exhibiting none of the calm or quiet one would expect in a creature of Death, so those were probably out, too. He felt no unnatural pull toward the tides of the moon or the turning of the sun. He couldn’t cast a spell to save his life; the time with the mountain ash that the boy went on about was probably a fluke of some kind. He was tall and pale, but didn’t seem to glow at all under any sort of light, and again the grace and balance were lacking.
The boy did love hearing himself speak, though. He could talk about anything and everything and nothing, and he could wrap all three of those things around themselves in one or two statements. It was something Peter could relate to; he enjoyed doing the same thing, just not at the volume and usually involving far less words. Quality over quantity, he’d always thought.
He was unnaturally good at research, too, being able to quickly find things that no normal teenage boy should be able to find, let alone so quickly. Derek and Scott had taken him on as a sort of librarian in their disjointed little not-pack, though they never provided him with the proper resources to effectively do his job. He would have offered some of his tomes and files to help the kid, but most of them were either in dead or ancient languages or penned by him. He doubted the kid knew the ancient languages, and he didn’t want anyone knowing enough about him to realize how very much he loved research and gaining knowledge. They knew he was hungry for power, and they were quick to link the knowledge he had with his quest for more power, which was just fine with him. Power could be found outside knowledge; it could also be found in secrecy and shadows. The less these idiots knew about him, the better off he’d be.
The problem with having this knowledge was that he could clearly see how other people employed the same tactics to keep their knowledge to themselves, whatever they wanted to use their knowledge for.
This boy, for instance: He honestly expected everyone in his life to call him Stiles. He introduces himself to new people this way. He avoids questions about his real first name, speaking in riddles about it and offering non-answers that were technically truths. It was such a fae thing to do that when Peter connected that with his height and his pale complexion, he had to stop and really think about whether Stiles could have been one of any number of the denizens of fae. He decided against that, though. Fae naturally exuded magic, and even when they glamoured it over, little things belied their magical nature.
Whenever he came up with an unexpected answer or fact about the monster of the week, he never wanted to talk sources, either. Some of the things the kid found were new information to Peter, who prided himself on his research and his extensive library, and Stiles would only ever shrug and say that Google was his friend if Peter asked him about his sources. (Peter was always the only one to ask him about his sources.) Later, Peter would try a boolean search on Google for the information Stiles had gained. Nothing ever came of those searches, and Peter was technologically savvy enough to find anything he needed on the internet these days. He’d even tried plugging search terms into some of the corners of the internet humans didn’t know existed, only to come up with nothing. It didn’t add up.
Peter couldn’t discount the boy’s willingness to fight alongside his friends, either. The boy had obviously never trained to fight off the lacrosse field. He wasn’t entirely convinced the boy had been trained to fight ON the lacrosse field, if he was being honest. His punches were weak, his kicks were more flails, he never found his center of gravity before lunging or shoving or tackling, and he always—ALWAYS—brought a bat to a claw fight. At least he upgraded from wood to aluminum as the years went on. Loyalty was admirable, and the boy was obviously brave, but he stood alongside Scott and Derek with a confidence he’d seen in few during a fight. He didn’t seem worried about the fray to come, the fact that he was a human facing down supernatural creatures with research and a bat at his disposal. He hurled himself around like he honestly wasn’t concerned he was going to be hurt, let alone face death. Even hunters entered battle scenarios with those healthy fears—the good ones used those fears to make themselves better.
No, Stiles Stilinski wasn’t human. He couldn’t be. He just also didn’t fit into any of the other boxes Peter had tried to fit him into yet. None of his tests and challenges revealed anything but a flexibility of thought, willingness to learn, and eye for strategy. Those could all be passed off as human traits, except…Except this boy was exceptional. He had more knowledge than anyone Peter had ever met, and he knew how to deflect attention from himself like a professional. That was okay, though. They had time for more tests and challenges. Peter could wait to find out. He was, after all, a patient man when he was in his right mind.
~~~
“Dude, this is not typical California earthquakes,” Stiles was shouting from ahead of him as they tried to outrun a hole in the ground stretching open behind them. The whole town had been shaken awake at 3:30 that morning, earthquake after earthquake forcing people out of their homes and toward disused designated earthquake survival shelters. Scott’s pack had met up at the edge of the Preserve, and Peter had tagged along because he was in town to see his daughter and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The kids were all back from their first year away at college or world-traveling or whatever else they got up to during an academic year after high school. Derek hadn’t come back to visit, though, which meant that Peter still had to make a trip out so he could get all his family visits done and over with for the summer. In the meantime, he’d had to listen to Scott and Stiles argue about whether or not the earthquakes were natural or supernatural at 4:15 on a Monday morning. Given the facts that they were still occurring and this was Beacon Hills, he had to agree with Stiles on this one: He seriously doubted these earthquakes were a natural product of anything. Someone was dipping their hand into matters that should not be trifled with. He just didn’t know WHO would be hand-dipping and WHAT matters were being trifled with.
Scott split them into “teams” to go “check out different parts of town” and “report back.” That was all they were given. They were in various states of undress, 4:15 am was a chilly time of day even in California in June, the ground beneath them was literally shaking and breaking open, and the Beacon Hills pack’s fearless leader couldn’t give them anything more to go on. He’d been paired with Stiles, which was fine with him in that he could tune out inane babble, but not fine because he had to keep the boy in front of him—clumsy and running weren’t the best things to combine in any given moment, but once earthquakes were added to the mix, he had to actually worry about Stiles Stilinski’s physical safety.
“No shit,” he shouted toward Stiles. “Keep running. Don’t fall.”
Stiles chose that exact moment to be incredibly rebellious, which was entirely uncalled for.
Peter watched Stiles screech to a physical halt and flail around for a couple seconds before the earth at the front of his feet cracked open and stretched wide. Peter blinked and then sprang forward, using his preternatural speed to his advantage as he watched Stiles flail ass over teakettle and into the gaping maw. Peter slid to the edge of the sudden cliff, digging the toes of his shoes into the ground below him as he went and coming to a stop with his head and his arms over the precipice.
Stiles hung by one arm two feet below Peter’s level edge, that hand wrapped tight around a root that was not going to hold for long. He looked wildly up at the noise Peter had been making with his arrival.
The opening created by the earthquake was deep. Peter could see the bottom, but it was in pretty heavy shadow. He figured it to be thirty or forty feet down, too far a drop for a human to survive—too far a drop for a lot of supernaturals to survive. Stiles was too far down for Peter to reach him without giving up the toe hold he’d gained with his slide. Without the hold, there was a good chance he’d simply topple over with Stiles, and then both of them would be dead and he’d never get to learn what Stiles was, and that wouldn’t do.
Another rumble shook the root Stiles clung to and his eyes went impossibly wider. “Peter! Do something, you useless Zombiewolf!”
He scowled, but extended his arms down as far as he could while still keeping his hold on the ground below him. “This is as far as I can reach safely, Stiles.”
The root curved a bit more.
“Peter, move your ass forward and bend more toward me! If you let me fall to my death, Malia is never going to want to be your daughter again!”
Malia barely wanted to be his daughter now. He wondered if Stiles knew that threat was particularly ineffective, and whether he was grasping at straws as well as tree roots.
“Stiles, if I do that, I will lose my toe hold. If I lose my toe hold, we are both going to end up in the bottom of this freakishly large opening in the ground. How far can you raise that other arm?”
Stiles raised his other arm, and some wood splintered off the base of the root he was holding on to. He still couldn’t reach that arm, but the distance was only a few centimeters at most. He sighed.
“You’re a flailer, Stiles. You know how to throw your weight into your body movements. Flail your free arm up to me, and I’ll grab it with my claws.” He extended his claws, showing the boy he meant to do just that. “There might be some slippage, but the claws will hold.”
The ground behind him picked up another rumble.
“Do it quickly, idiot! The earth around us is picking up speed again. Let’s go!”
Stiles grimaced and huffed loudly out of his nose, but he tensed up and sort of threw his hand further into the air, his body rocking with the force of the movement. Peter grabbed the bare forearm now in his reach just as the root Stiles was holding snapped off completely. He dug his claws in deep and held on as best he could with his palms. Stiles’s grimace deepened.
“If you let go of me, Uncle Creepy, I will fucking HAUNT you. Get me the hell out of here; those claws hurt.”
Stiles was heavy. He kept going on about being under 150 pounds, but there was absolutely no way, even if Peter was dealing with 150 pounds of dead weight. He could have lifted 150 pounds of dead weight with no problem. He’d hauled his nephew’s unconscious ass up and out of situations more precarious than this. He had a good hold on the arm. He should have been able to lift the kid out by just that. Instead, his arms were starting to shake from the strain.
“You’re going to have to help me, Stiles.”
Sweat started beading on his forehead and around the back of his neck.
“I can’t lift you out like this, you annoying—” He could feel one toe hold shift slightly. A scrawny nineteen year old kid should not be this heavy.
“Little—” He grit his teeth, stretching his torso out as far as he could.
“Freak!”
Stiles grunted. The arm between his claws flexed. Stiles swayed bodily, causing the grip Peter had on him to slip slightly, and then another hand grabbed hold of Peter’s wrist.
He exhaled and brought one hand to the other arm, claws digging into the skin there. Stiles’s hands wrapped around his forearms, his nails biting into skin. The boy chewed his nails constantly. There was absolutely no way those things could be that sharp, or that long! He could see the points, given the chewing and the tearing. They would be more pointed and ridged than most.
He watched as Stiles scrambled for a foothold against the side of the cliff, finding no purchase and slipping slightly down the crumbling dirt and rock.
“Not helping,” Peter huffed out. This kid must be completely solid muscle to weigh this much. This was entirely ridiculous at this point.
“Ugh,” Stiles declared before looking up and meeting Peter’s eyes. “What do you want ME to do about this? I’m sorta stuck here, Creep!”
Peter fought the urge to roll his eyes. Now was not the point for sarcastic points to be made. If he didn’t get Stiles out of this chasm, Scott McCall might actually call peasants wielding torches and pitchforks into Beacon Hills just so they could run him out of town. He ground his teeth together to keep from shaking too noticeably.
“Rest your feet against that entirely useless dirt. When I say go, push yourself up using that foothold as much as you can. I’ll pull at the same time. That should do it.”
That had better do it. He was running out of ideas that didn’t boil down to drop the kid and run like hell for South America. 147 pounds of pale skin and fragile bones his left ass cheek. He was pretty sure that the frankentwins combined didn’t weigh as much as Stiles Stilinski.
“Ready?”
Stiles stared at him with that determined look he sometimes got in his eyes right before he did something very stupid. Peter tensed and tried not to preemptively flinch. The kid’s nails were killing him.
“Go!”
He pulled up with every ounce of strength in him, calling in all his werewolf abilities and using them. Stiles scrabbled and flailed himself up the dirt wall until they were facing each other. The scrabbling sound stopped, and Peter’s arms shook violently.
Stiles was going to fall. Peter HATED South America.
He did the only thing left to him. Telegraphing his movements as best he could so that Stiles would hopefully catch on and not die in this insane move, he stretched his neck and extended his fangs. He didn’t know if Stiles had caught on to his intentions or was lifting one last prayer to a heaven that most certainly didn’t exist, but he shifted slightly, exposing more of his neck. Peter latched on with his fangs, sinking them in as deeply as he could, hoping like hell he didn’t hit an artery or major vein, and then flung his head back and to the side, his teeth still deep in the kid’s throat. With some of the weight off his hands and arms, he could swing them in the same direction he flung his head.
The kid rose up and over the ledge, thumping back somewhere behind and to the right of Peter. Peter’s body slid forward, shooting out further over the chasm and then down. He tried to grip the edge with his feet as his body swung forward and impacted with the cliff side. The jolt of the whump and then the little pins and needles of pressure and pain covered the front half of his body. The only thought he had time to entertain was I don’t have a plan for this.
He closed his eyes, but he didn’t fall. Two warm cuffs held his ankles in place. They may have been hand shaped.
Another thought invaded his mind: I am SO royally screwed! Don’t you die on me now, you asshole.
The thought didn’t make any sense—while he was royally screwed, he never really talked to himself in the second person. His pep talks usually took place in the first person. Also, he was pretty certain he would never, ever use the phrase “royally screwed,” even if it was the truth.
He was being bodily raised out of the chasm solely by the—hands, they had to be hands—grasping his ankles until finally he rolled onto blessedly flat earth. The ground had even stopped rumbling and rolling. He kept his eyes closed as he taught himself how to breathe like a normal being again.
Images flashed through his mind—images that couldn’t belong to him. Images of him laying on the ground, supporting himself with his elbows and gasping, his shirt partially rucked up. Images of Stiles crossing the distance between them and laying down on top of him, Stiles’s mouth sucking on his neck. Nothing was actually laying on him. He couldn’t feel lips against his skin, even though he could feel and taste saltybittertang skin rasping against his tongue. Images of his own arms wrapped around Stiles, their bodies curved together and—
Even as he was indulging his clearly addled brain, the images cut off and a sharp FUCK rang through his thoughts.
He sat up and opened his eyes, taking a look at his forearms before settling his gaze on Stiles Stilinski. Five sharp points had scarred their way onto the otherwise unmarred skin of both Peter’s arms. He thought about them healing while he stared at the boy in front of him, but he could feel that they wouldn’t.
“Are you…TELEPATHIC?” was what Peter led with. It wasn’t the smoothest of lines, but the kid had somehow managed to leave claw-shaped scars on his arms, the thoughts and images in his head were completely foreign to him, as if what somebody else were seeing and imagining, and Stiles was staring at him like the proverbial deer in the headlights. The kid had done something to invade his mind, and had no right to be there. He grimaced at the boy and conjured his own images of having ripped the boy’s throat out and licking the blood off his claws, just in case the kid was being a voyeuristic little shit.
“Stiles, I asked you a question. Are you telepathic?”
A litany of shit, shit, shit, shit, shit rang through his thoughts, a high-pitched falsetto screech that drowned his own thought patterns out. The thoughts screamed and careened around. It felt like they were bouncing off his skull, giving him a headache.
“N-n-n-no” was the verbal response to his question. It seemed more of a question, itself. He closed his eyes and practiced some of the deep breathing he’d learned in the Buddhist monastery, trying to calm thoughts that clearly weren’t his, hoping that doing so would allow him to form coherent sentences again. Thoughts stopped racing into his skull, replaced by a single image: Peter standing there in almost a Mountain Pose, his eyes closed and his chest rising and falling at regular intervals. He looked much more peaceful than he felt. He looked SOFT, the muscles in his face and neck slack and his body looking more poised than tense in the pose he was holding. He felt the smile slide up his face, and then he watched it reflect in the image in his head.
“Try again, Stiles. You’re the only one around here, and while I can visualize things, I do not have the ability to see with a third eye.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, dude.” The words sounded confident, but Stiles’s voice was shaky. Peter opened his eyes and sat down on the now-still earth, maintaining his deep breathing.
“What are you?”
Stiles offered a half shrug and a strangled laugh. “I’m the pack human, Peter. You’ve known that for years now.”
He shook his head. “No, for years now I’ve been trying to puzzle out what you were. These?” He held one forearm up and pointed at it with his other hand. “These are claw marks. You have claws.”
Stiles offered spirit fingers in return. “Dude, do these look like claws? Sure the nails are a bit of a mess, but what can I say? I’m a biter—a NAIL biter! I bite my nails! So they’re more stubby than clawlike, really, and I—”
Peter extended his claws, then retracted them. Stiles wasn’t an idiot. Claws could generally be controlled in most species that had them.
He watched Stiles’s face fall. Hopefully that was resignation and Peter would finally get his answers.
“Fine, those are claw marks. I’m sorry, dude, but fuck! I didn’t want to die! I wasn’t expecting you to use your damn TEETH to fling me out of the hole! This is mostly your fault, you know!” Stiles pointed an index finger toward him. “There had to be another way out of there! You didn’t have to BITE me while we were claw to claw! If you can hear my—it shouldn’t have been enough to—I am going to die.” Stiles dropped his finger and swung his chin down until it bounced against his chest. “This is how I die. Barely making it to twenty, totally proving my friend’s mom right. Ugh.”
Peter arched an eyebrow, not sure which part of that ramble to address first. The whole death thing sounded like it could be pressing, but what annoyed him more was that he now knew the “human” had claws and was slightly telepathic and still had no idea what Stiles could be.
“If you’re going to be dying soon, could you kindly tell me what you are so at least my curiosity can be sated first?”
His head went silent, even his own thoughts drowning in black static. It was unexpected, but not horrible. He let his body relax with the dark hum in his head and waited for an answer of any kind.
Across from him, Stiles sighed the kind of sigh Peter and what was left of his family normally leveled at the boy and muttered something vaguely like “shitdamnfuck.” “You’ll probably figure it out now, anyway. I’m fucked whether or not you know, so why the hell not? I’m going to need you to swear on something you actually find important that no one, and I mean NO ONE finds out about this from you. It’s actually kind of life or death, Peter. Seriously. I know it sounds insanely dramatic for me to say that, but it’s the truth. I’ll trust you because I fucked myself completely over and now have absolutely no choice BUT to trust you, but I need to hear you say that you will not intimate, imply, suggest, or outright tell anyone what I’m about to reveal to you, no matter what they may do or say in order to find out. Nobody, Zombiewolf. Nobody can know.”
He entertained the notion of not making that vow. Vows were typically fairly serious to him, and this sounded like it had the potential to completely rile the boy up. One of Peter’s favorite pastimes was annoying Stiles until the boy spluttered and flailed. It had become remarkably easy to achieve over the years, and he missed the sport of it. If he made this vow, he wouldn’t be able to use the information to get under Stiles’s skin. On the other side, if he made this vow he would finally, FINALLY know what Stiles was. He could move on.
He nodded. “Alright, Stiles, I will in no way let on that I know what you are, even under pain of torture or promise of death.”
Stiles closed his eyes, pursed his lips, and then nodded. “It would probably be better to show you than tell you. Get ready for that telepathy thing again.”
A new set of images filled his mind. These didn’t accost him as much as flow through his brain, like a movie reel set successfully on its spindle. Images of a young boy next to the sheriff, probably Stiles, extending and retracting claws while his dad laughed at him. The claws were wider than wolf claws, thicker all around. Their points looked just as painful. The boy stared at his claws with something akin to wonder on his face.
The young boy, only slightly older, staring in a bathroom mirror. His eyes were the green of pure emeralds having been just polished, his pupils the slits of cats’ eyes.
A pre-pubescent Stiles back in front of that same mirror, his chest heaving and his nostrils flaring deeply on every exhale, deep breathing over and over as he stared at his reflection. After a bit, smoke curled out of his nostrils in small tendrils and upstreams. The deep breathing stopped and Stiles smirked into the mirror.
Teenage Stiles, with a buzz cut and the gangly limbs he’d had when Peter had first met him, punching a tree in a forest with his bare knuckles. His legs and arms shook. His abdomen heaved out and crunched in. The scowl on his face looked angry. Stiles delivered one more punch. The tree splintered and cracked in half, tumbling away from him. His whole body shuddered. A reflective shine from the sun shimmered down an iridescence that suddenly covered his body in time with the shudder. The reflections were white and blues and purples.
Stiles in the suit he’d worn to his high school graduation, standing in his backyard at night. The sky above was cloudless and filled with millions of shiny stars. Stiles removed his suit jacket and laid it on the battered deck chair behind him. A whoosh and a thud split the night around him, but nothing appeared to change. Then Stiles jumped and kept rising. He twisted as he rose, barrel rolled. He let out hoots and hollers and rose even more before leveling off and flying through the night sky. He darted and wove and somersaulted in the air, gaining speed. His eyes were closed, his body glowing with that same iridescence in the other scene. He looked peaceful and happy. Not giddy, like Stiles got. Not joyful, as the pack in Beacon Hills was used to seeing, but well and truly happy. Peter wasn’t sure he’d ever seen that look on Stiles before. It was a good look. Not an ounce of him looked clumsy or awkward.
The images stopped, and he looked at the Stiles across from him now. The kid looked nervous.
“That was fascinating, Stiles, but you still haven’t told me what you are.”
Stiles snorted. “Yes, I did. It’s just not something you’d jump to. I gave you all the clues you need to figure it out. All you have to do is piece them together.”
Peter shrugged and set to work piecing. He had claws, but not animal claws. His eyes changed with the shift, looking more like gemstones than creature eyes. The pupils slit like a cat, but he had no other cat traits. He breathed smoke, but only apparently when he wanted to. It didn’t come natural at first—Stiles had to work at it. He had supernatural strength, which he apparently didn’t just naturally use. His shift made him shiny, iridescent. His body morphed into tones of whites, blues, and purples with an actual shift. He couldn’t tell if Stiles had control of it or not. Stiles could fly. Stiles was apparently slightly telepathic, as well. Peter was fairly sure Stiles wasn’t able to read his thoughts, because the kid hadn’t commented once on the appropriateness of Peter’s own thoughts, but he could project his thoughts and memories to others. All of that was fascinating, but didn’t offer him a definitive answer.
Mers looked iridescent. Their scales shifted and glowed based on the light around them. Mers didn’t breathe smoke, though, and could only be out of the water for extended periods of time under very choice circumstances and with decades of planning. Mers didn’t fly. He had claws and cat eyes, but no fur at all. Nothing he’d been shown suggested enhanced senses, as would be found in most animalistic species. He could fly.
Certain types of fae could fly. Fae blood would also explain the natural skin tone and the pearlescent shine of his shift. Possibly his supernatural strength, though like shifters they usually had complete control over it. Their true eyes normally glittered, though, containing bits of star stuff. They didn’t tend to produce smoke from inside their bodies. It was the most likely scenario, though.
“Fae.”
Stiles smirked and huffed. “Wrong. I told you, it’s not something you’d jump to.”
Pearlescent blue and purple wings unfolded in his mind’s eye. What appeared to be bone spikes protruded from the tri-tips of the wings, one bone spike jagging up from the outermost joint. They were covered not with feathers, but with scales. Millions and millions of miniscule scales covered the wings, what looked like purple leather encasing the harder seams and joints.
Stiles’s shift body was covered in tiny scales. He had wings. He could fly. He was far heavier than physically possible. He produced smoke. The pieces slammed together hard enough to jar in his mind and he gasped.
“Those haven’t existed since the time of Ancient Sumeria! They were hunted to extinction.”
Stiles hissed. “Keep your voice down! What if the pack has decided to come look for us? You promised, Peter! No one means NO ONE!”
Peter took a deep breath in. He’d read about them, of course, spent an insane amount of time researching what everyone had believed was an extinct creature, but he didn’t know what to do now that Stiles was sitting in front of him and claiming to actually be one. The boy had no reason to lie about this, and the pieces did fit together well if this was the case, but still.
Dragons.
He wasn’t sure what to do with that information. Something that felt very near to awe flitted through his mind, a fizzy sort of bubble trail across his brain and little jolts through his nervous system. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt anything like that. He wasn’t overly big on feeling in general these days.
He had to know. He had to be sure.
“Also, they aren’t telepathic. Absolutely none of my research has even hinted at telepathy as a possibility.”
Stiles chuckled. It didn’t sound sarcastic or demeaning or anything like his usual laughs. “None of your research suggested they are still around, remember? Maybe try to put less stock in what’s been written by outsiders.”
All he’d ever HAD was material written by outsiders. Beacon Hills didn’t draw rare supernaturals to it, and Talia had never let him travel far before the fire. There was always too much dirty work to get done for a sabbatical.
“It isn’t usually, actually. Telepathy. As a general rule, we aren’t.”
Stiles’s face scrunched a bit, and then I will talk about all this with you, but not here. Not now. I don’t know who might hear what.
Peter chuckled. “Not telepathic, huh?”
Stiles stood up, looking more relaxed than Peter had ever seen him. The kid reached a hand out to help him up. “Shut up. Let’s find the pack and see what they’ve found.”
~~~
The pack had apparently found a very angry earth golem. It was still entirely too early in the morning for Peter to deal with earth golems, so he called a friend of his who specialized in creation magic and had her deal with it, and then the pack dispersed for the morning.
Peter found Stiles sitting on a deck chair in his backyard approximately thirty minutes later. He sat himself on the other deck chair and simply waited.
“We aren’t telepathic under normal circumstances. Our manipulation energy is very internal. We can naturally only effect ourselves.”
He had no idea what the boy was trying to tell him. “Effect yourselves how, exactly?”
Stiles snorted. “I look like a nineteen year old boy. When I’m not hanging on for dear life and trying not to fall to my death, I feel like 147 pounds of bone and flesh. I control what kind of heartbeats others hear from me. I keep my shift in. I decide who gets to see what. I decide what I should smell like around people with enhanced senses of smell. I can manipulate myself to give off any appearance I’d like.”
That sounded…handy. Peter had excellent control of himself—when he was in his right mind, at least—but that level of self regulation would make Peter’s life much, much easier. “Is that something you can teach someone else? Someone…not like you?”
Stiles smiled and sat back further in his chair. “The off the cuff answer is no. Now, though, there’s a small chance I could. We’ll have to see how things progress.”
That was an interesting answer, but now didn’t seem the time to follow that up. He switched topics, instead. “Are you still going to die?”
Stiles chuffed. “Absolutely. I did a very, very serious thing without getting the proper blessings and endorsements, and I did it outside the proper race. It may have been a complete accident, but I’ll still be held accountable. There will still be a reckoning.”
Peter wasn’t sure how that was any different from any given day in Beacon Hills. There were always reckonings over accidents, and nobody ever did what they were supposed to do. He’d always assumed that it was the modus operandi with this pack. It was one of the many reasons he’d hated Beacon Hills since a few years before the fire. This place was violence and chaos.
“Is it the telepathy, that you shared thoughts and visions with me?”
Stiles rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “They’re not really visions, they’re—it doesn’t really matter. The Very Serious Thing caused the telepathy in the first place. Don’t worry about it; I’ll figure something out and get out of it with at least a little of my hide intact.”
Peter didn’t doubt that. Stiles had always been resourceful. He could adapt to almost any situation thrown his way. Still, punishment was overwhelmingly not fun on general principle. Stiles seemed to enjoy gallows humor, so he followed up with “when’s the hanging?” to see if he could get the kid—dragon, the dragon—to smile a bit.
It almost worked.
“Whenever I end up not being here, I suppose. Why do you think I’m sitting out on my back deck and not inside curled up with coffee and a movie?”
He had no idea. He really hadn’t paid enough attention to Stiles’s habits and proclivities outside pack business to know whether the boy preferred to be outside or inside. He had no idea why Stiles would think he would know that.
An electric white flash of lightning made contact with the grass fifteen feet away from them.
Stiles sighed. “That’s my cue, man. If I come back at all, maybe I’ll be able to explain things better. Thanks for saving my bacon this morning, even if it did completely screw me.” Stiles stood up and walked toward the charred spot on the lawn.
So much about the morning made no sense to him. He fired off one last question: “If you can fly, why didn’t you simply fly your way out of that chasm?”
Stiles looked back over his shoulder and snorted. “Death before discovery, my man. Death before discovery.”
Stiles leaped into the air and then kept ascending. Peter lost him in the clouds above them. He shook his head slightly. Stiles could FLY. The world kept getting stranger and stranger. He stood up to leave.
An older oriental woman stepped out of the tree line. She appeared to be around Satomi Ito’s age, judging by appearances. Of course, he more than most people knew that age could not be accurately obtained through judging appearances. She continued to approach his position on the back deck, a serene smile on her face. She had the same coloring as the former Ito alpha, suggesting she was possibly Japanese, as well, but she was much taller than Satomi. She wore a plain black sweater, dark wash skinny jeans, and running shoes. Her straight black hair was long and worn down, bangs falling evenly across the whole of her forehead. He doubted she was wearing any makeup, but it looked like she didn’t need any. She was lithe and graceful, carrying herself like a professional dancer.
She halted her advance at the bottom of the back deck and inclined her head just slightly toward him. He nodded back to her, and for just a moment she looked annoyed. The smile fell back into place almost immediately, though.
“You are Peter Hale,” she pronounced. Her accent was definitely Japanese. “I am Hime. Sit down. We must talk.”
He couldn’t get any kind of read on this woman at all. He couldn’t even HEAR her heartbeat. She had no smell. The breaths she took sounded even and controlled. He remembered something Stiles had said. I decide who gets to see what. This woman was very probably a dragon. He’d been led to believe that dragons were extinct, and in only the span of a few hours, he had already met two of them. He wondered how many more were hiding in the world.
He sat down. This woman looked old. She spoke with authority. She was very probably a member of a race he’d thought was extinct, and Stiles left a few seconds ago honestly worried that he was going to die. Going against Hime’s wishes seemed like a very, very bad idea.
She nodded. “Good.” She sat down in the chair Stiles had formerly occupied and made a show of looking him over. “Stiles has never mentioned you before. This is odd. He usually speaks at great length about his ‘pack,’ but nothing of you, Peter Hale. Why is this?”
He couldn’t think of a single reason Stiles would ever have had to bring him up in the first place. They weren’t friends. They were hardly allies. Stiles had very seriously wanted him dead on several occasions. “I suppose the easiest answer would be that I was never really a packmate. It would have been extremely odd if he HAD talked about me.”
She hummed in response. “Bond-mating is a very serious ordeal, Peter Hale. Stiles is young, still technically a nestling, and even he knows bond-mating is not something to be taken lightly.”
Was this confusion? His eyes were blinking more rapidly, his cheeks tingled slightly, and his jaw was clenched. He had no idea what this woman was talking about, and nothing about this moment made any sense. This was confusion. He was confused. He didn’t like it. Why was he suddenly experiencing feelings?
“It may help this conversation immensely if you were to tell me what bond mating is, Hime-san.”
She laughed, the sound gentle and lilting. “Our bond-mates are probably a bit like your werewolf mates. We, also, mate for life, which is why so many of our kind choose not to mate at all. Bond-mating is normally only done after petitions and approvals, and only ever between two of our kind. Not only did little Stiles skip the petitions and approvals and bond outside his kind, but he did not enter into a mutual bond-mating—he bonded to you, but you did not bond to him.” She shook her head softly. “It is unfortunate, but actions must be taken to rectify this behavior. It is the way of things, Peter Hale. You understand.”
No. He still did not understand at all. He and Stiles had not bonded or mated in any way. He’d saved Stiles’s life, and Stiles had kept him from falling to his own death because of it. He said as much to the dragon in front of him.
The smile returned to her face, but it looked more wistful than serene. “Actions, Peter Hale. To our kind, it has always been actions over words. He completed his half of the bond-mating ritual, no matter the circumstances behind it. He is bonded to you, now, and will very likely die for it.”
This whole thing was completely insane. This was something his nephew would have found himself involved in, not Peter! His nephew was the idiot in the family, yet HE was the one in this idiotic situation. He sighed.
“I was trying to save his life. He kept me from dying because of it. We were attempting to keep each other alive, not sentence him to death. Besides, I don’t feel bound, mated, or in any other way beholden to him, so there’s a very real chance that this ritual you speak of never actually took place.”
“I already told you, Peter Hale. You did not bond to him in return. The bond must be in place before one can feel bound.”
Stiles couldn’t die. He’d lose the only fun he’d ever found in Beacon Hills if Stiles died. “What if I willingly bonded to him? Would he still have to die? I already vowed that I would never reveal your existence to anyone, and I happen to take my vows very seriously. If I turned the bond mutual, could he come through with his life intact?”
The smile dropped off her face and her eyes narrowed. “Do you have feelings for Stiles, Peter Hale? Do you want to be bonded with him? The bond should only be completed willingly and for the continuation of our kind.”
He didn’t know the answer to either of those questions. He didn’t have feelings much at all, let alone about PEOPLE. Of course he could feel the hollow hole in the pit of his stomach when he thought about Lucas or Isobel. He experienced a slow warmth when he saw his nephew or his niece. Those were probably feelings. The woman in front of him left him feeling confused. Did he have any feelings in relation to Stiles? He was pleasantly satisfied with their banter. That was a feeling. He enjoyed the sport in chasing or annoying Stiles. That was probably a feeling, too. He suspected that hole in the pit of his stomach would widen slightly if Stiles died.
He nodded. “Yes, I suppose I do have feelings for Stiles. I don’t know if they’re the kind of feelings you’re looking for, but the fact that feelings are there in the first place tells me everything I need to know. I don’t want Stiles to die. I don’t want Stiles disappearing and depriving me of the little joy I get out of life. I would willingly bond with him because of this.”
Her eyes narrowed further and her hands fell to her lap, clasping each other. Seconds passed under her silent stare, and Peter was actually starting to feel hot under the collar of his t-shirt. The sun had come up, but it was still chilly out. His inhale hiccuped in his throat.
After what had to be a full minute, she reached one hand into the air and snapped her fingers.
A dozen older men and Stiles snapped into being in Stiles’s backyard, Stiles mid speech.
“—pened because I was HONORING ‘death over discovery’! You drilled that into us from our first day in the nest! I was FOLLOWING your ORDERS! It is not my fault that someone else didn’t want me to die!”
Stiles paused and then looked around, gaze settling in on Peter and eyes narrowing. “What are YOU doing here?”
Peter smirked. THIS, he could handle. The upper hand was again available for the taking. “I never left, Stiles. I was going to go back to my apartment and mourn your loss, but then this lovely lady beside me took a seat and explained to me what was going on.”
He watched as Stiles’s eyes widened to almost cartoon proportions. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. His mouth didn’t close.
“Stiles, if you really wanted to give yourself to me, all you had to do was say something.” He winked at the boy—dragon—in the hot seat for effect. “Now I’ve found that you’ve bonded yourself to me for life and you didn’t even ask. Consent is sexy, kid.”
Stiles gawped at him like a fish out of water. He did know THIS feeling. He was very good at pride, no matter what. He turned to Hime. “If I willingly bonded with him and agreed to help further your kind through our bond, would there still be any need for him to be killed or maimed in any way?”
Hime hummed. The dozen older men tittered and whispered at each other.
Stiles found his voice. “Peter, you can’t. Bond-mating is FOR LIFE. You’re not a—you’re not one of us! You don’t know what you’re committing to if you complete the ritual tying you to me!”
He shrugged. “So tell me.”
“You know that telepathy thing?” Stiles asked. “It would be two way. I could hear your thoughts, as well! And while we are bonded, you could never mate with anyone else. I don’t think you could even SLEEP with anyone else, honestly. And my kind mates for life—”
“Wolves mate for life too, Stiles. If I mated with you here and now, I would never WANT to mate with anyone else. I’m a wolf. A mate is a mate. That last would be a moot point in this instance.”
Stiles spluttered. Hime rested a hand against Peter’s arm. “Bond-mating mutually with one of our kind would stand for the extent of OUR life, Peter Hale. We can live for millenia—”
“Note the PLURAL use of that word!” Stiles interjected.
Hime continued as if Stiles hadn’t interrupted her. “—and Stiles is very, very young. Bond-mating with him would extend your lifetime to match his. It’s one of the reasons we keep bond-mating within our ranks—we all live to about the same age naturally, so it does not disturb the natural order of things.”
Peter snorted. He couldn’t help it. Natural order of things. Please. “We’re supernatural creatures, Hime-san. We have our own order. I find that I care enough about Stiles that I do not want him dead. I have a natural aversion to death, which Stiles can already attest to. There is enough in this world to keep me happily occupied for a very, very long time. Of all the people in my life, I find Stiles the least offensive, so exploring these things with him is perfectly acceptable.”
The dozen old men twittered and hissed to each other, then the two in the middle nodded once, perfectly in sync, to Hime. She smiled up at him, the corners of her mouth turning up more than before and her brown eyes twinkling slightly.
“It is agreed, Peter Hale. You may finish the bond-mating with young Stiles, and then we can all get on with our day.”
Stiles squawked and then sort of hiccuped.
Peter waited, but nobody said or did anything. He turned back to Hime. “I don’t know what to do to finish the bond-mating properly.”
Hime gestured for Stiles to come and join them. Stiles scowled at Peter, but stepped toward them. Peter smirked. “Now, dearest, is that any way to greet your mate?”
Stiles’s scowl darkened and his lips puckered. He looked angry. Peter wondered if he was going to punch any trees over.
Hime rested a hand against the back of Stiles’s head, and Stiles’s expression evened out.
“You must let him bite you, Peter Hale. That will complete the ritual.”
That didn’t sound terrible. He’d been bitten before—
“On the throat,” Stiles announced, a smirk alighting on his face.
That could be a little more problematic. Offering one’s throat was always an act of submission for a wolf. He realized objectively that if Stiles was going to be his mate, there would be a tiny bit of submission there. Successful mates always honored the give and take in a relationship. His mother and father had drummed that into him from an early age. He’d agreed to do this for Stiles. He even had FEELINGS about doing this for Stiles. If this was the way, this was the way.
He shrugged and offered a side of his throat.
Stiles looked at him like he was worried Peter had lost himself again and was going to begin ripping people to shreds at any moment. Peter sighed. “Come on, Stiles. If you’re going to bite me, bite me. Consider it payback for Scott, if you’d like, but do something. You’ve got thirteen—of your kind just standing there waiting on you to make something official. Commit, kid. You started this; finish it.”
Stiles leaned forward and then he felt lips snuffle against the join of his collar bone to his neck. It was the same location that he’d used to grab onto Stiles and haul him the last little bit out of that hole this morning, but on the other side of his body. Hands wrapped around his forearms, pointed claws pricking at the scars from this morning that hadn’t healed over yet. This was probably the reason they hadn’t healed. The claws punctured his skin exactly where they had before, sinking deeper than even this morning. He wrapped his hands around the boy’s forearms, trusting this ritual to allow him to find the exact marks he had made that morning, and sunk his own claws into his…his mate’s skin.
Teeth worried at the skin between those lips. He could feel four sharp fangs protruding farther than the other teeth, much like his canid fangs. They sunk into his skin before smaller, sharper fangs between them followed suit. Molten heat poured into those puncture wounds and flowed through veins and arteries in his body. His chest got tighter, his airways constricting slightly. He tilted his head a bit more and found the scars on Stiles’s neck from his bite this morning with his own lips. He latched on to those scars, his fangs extruding and digging into salty skin as he bit his mate in return.
This close, Stiles smelled like cinnamon—not the sugary scent of cinnamon when mixed with sugar that everyone always associated with baked goods, but spicy, pungent cinnamon, the kind that made him want to close his eyes and enjoy with a pitcher full of milk on standby.
He flicked his tongue out against the skin caught between his teeth. Stiles might have smelled like cinnamon, but he tasted like sourwood honey. He tasted dark and exotic and only slightly sweet. Peter wanted more.
The heat poured out of his veins and settled against his muscles and tissue, burning him slowly from the inside out. It was white hot and ice cold as it spread to the tips of his fingers and toes, spreading lazily like melting wax instead of raging like the inferno of a backdraft. He was on fire, and this time it was the most comfortable he’d ever felt.
It took him several long moments to notice that Stiles had pulled back, but then he pulled back to. He looked into Stiles’s eyes and knew, right away, that this was his mate. He was pretty sure the feeling wasn’t “love,” as Talia had always described it to his nieces as they’d grown up. He wasn’t entirely sure that this process had made him like the kid anymore than he had before, but he knew he belonged with this being for the rest of all time. He felt…comfortable, lazy like he’d just woken up slowly. Stiles smiled at him, flashing those precious-gem eyes.
“It is done,” Hime pronounced. “The bond is complete.”
This could actually be alright, Peter realized.