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One spring day, when she was a young girl barely taller than the cello she would soon devote most of her time to, Paige found herself standing on the back porch with her mother, staring out at the forest that began where their carefully mowed lawn ended.
"Paige," her mother said, one slim hand resting on Paige's small shoulder, "do you remember when I told you that you must never go into the forest?"
Paige nodded. She'd been even younger when that conversation took place, young enough that she could barely remember the actual words her mother spoke. But she'd absorbed the message of the conversation deeply, to the point that her feet never touched the last blade of grass in their yard. Her fingers never touched any of the tree trunks bordering their yard, even on her most rambunctious days of play.
Never go into the forest.
"Well, it's time I told you why," her mother said with a deep sigh, before launching into a tale more fanciful than any of the animated movies Paige had watched.
A tale of beasts that lurked in the shadows on the full moon, desperate to rip flesh from bones, of creatures with needle-like teeth that needed blood to survive, of wraiths that slipped along on the wind and had the power to suck the breath from a person's lungs with a kiss.
"But most importantly," her mother said, kneeling down so that they were eye to eye, "you must stay out of the forest because that is where the faeries live."
"What do they look like?" Paige asked.
"We don't know," her mother said with a soft shrug. "No human has ever seen a faerie and survived."
&.
Paige was a good listener.
She hung on to her teacher's every word at school, made mental note of every suggestion her cello coach gave her, dutifully took the advice of online articles when her grades slipped slightly.
But more importantly, she listened to her mother, whose words were always playing on a continuous loop in the back of her mind.
She never went into the forest. Not when she accidentally kicked a soccer ball into the trees, not when she could hear an animal crying out in pain just beyond the treeline, not even when she reached high school and staying a night in the forest became a rite of passage for Beacon Hills' youth.
(Not all of them came back.)
She was curious; denying that was impossible. But she managed to sate her curiosity by sitting at her window late at night, especially on the evenings where the new moon was barely a speck in the sky. She stared into the dark clump of the trees until her vision was swimming and she was starting to convince herself that every errant dot of light was a set of eyes, staring back at her.
Paige was a good listener.
But that was before she heard the girl.
&.
The wind was blowing through the trees and the spring sun was just barely caressing her cheeks when Paige heard the scream.
It ripped her away from the song she'd been practicing, notes floating gently towards the sky. When she glanced up, fingers tightening around her bow, she saw nothing except forest extending for miles.
She blinked.
She didn't know how she'd missed the girl the first time. She was right on the edge of the forest, lying between two trees, her outstretched arms resting on the lawn. Another scream, more muted this time, left her mouth and without thinking, Paige carefully set her cello down and leaped over the three steps leading into the back yard.
"Are you okay?" she called out, feet automatically slowing to a stop as she neared the edge of the grass. After a seemingly eternal moment of silence, the girl lifted her head up and Paige stumbled backwards, sucking in a gasp.
Underneath the girl's curtain of dark, nearly black hair, her face was soaked in blood.
"Please help me," she whispered before her head dropped back down and her entire body sagged, like the air had been let out of it.
Paige closed the space between them, wrapped her fingers around the girl's lax wrists and pulled as hard as she could. Haltingly, the body slid across the grass. By the time Paige had moved well away from the foreboding line of trees, sweat was beading on her forehead and wrists. She lowered the girl's arms gently before she dropped to her knees, carefully searching for a pulse in a wrist that was going to be bruised from the grip of her fingers.
Eventually, a heartbeat let itself be known under her fingertips and she sighed deeply.
"What happened to you?" she asked, not entirely sure if the girl was still conscious. "Were you attacked?"
"Yes." The word was followed by a long bout of coughing that left blood splattered across the grass. Just when Paige was ready to get up and dial 911, the coughing abruptly stopped. "But I couldn't see what it was. It jumped on my back and tore at my face. It had claws."
"Do you want me to call an ambulance?"
"No!" The sheer ferocity of the word made Paige back away slightly. After a few moments, the girl's crumpled body slowly unfolded and sat up. Her long fingers brushed matted strands of bloodied hair away from her face. Her injuries looked more minor than Paige had expected; there were some long gashes down her cheeks and a deeper one curling down onto her neck, but the sheer amount of blood didn't seem to match the relatively shallow wounds.
"I just need some water. And some..." She paused, lips curling into a frown, eyes clouded with confusion. "And some peroxide, I think."
"I'll be right back," Paige said, getting to her feet.
When she came back out with the requested supplies, the girl had managed to move herself halfway across the lawn. As she cleaned herself up, Paige couldn't help but take her in some more. Her clothes were dirty, but remarkably lacking in blood or rips. Strangest of all was that her feet were bare and only lightly covered with dirt, no scratches in sight.
"What happened to your shoes?" she asked.
"They fell off," the girl muttered, pouring peroxide into her hands before rubbing her palms along her cheeks. Even though Paige could hear the wounds hissing as they were disinfected, the girl didn't even wince. Instead, she looked up and smiled slightly.
"I'm Tracy, by the way."
"Paige." Paige was all too aware that she was at least a dozen steps away from the stairs that would lead her into the house. For reasons she couldn't quite nail down, the urge to run was thrumming at the back of her mind. "Didn't anyone tell you not to go into the forest?"
"I just moved here," Tracy replied. "All I wanted to do was go for a walk."
Something about the words didn't ring true, but Paige couldn't nail that down either. Instead, she took one step backwards, just in case, and asked Tracy if she needed anything else.
"I think I'll be fine," Tracy said, slowly getting to her feet and draining the last of the water in the bottle. Most of the blood was cleaned from her face and really, her wounds looked no worse than bad scratches from a cat. "Sorry for the hysterics. There was just so much blood."
"Yes," Paige said, glancing over at the break in the trees that Tracy had emerged from. "There was."
When her parents returned later that evening, Paige did not tell them about the girl who had mysteriously appeared in the yard and left again almost as quickly.
But she stayed up until nearly sunrise, arms braced against the window, staring out into the dark.
For once, the forest remained motionless.
&.
When Paige returned to school that Monday, Tracy was waiting for her.
Or at least that was what it felt like. When Paige filed off the bus, Tracy was leaning against a nearby car, arms clutching a handful of books, looking for all the world like an outsider.
Her skin was entirely unbroken, not even by the slightest pimple or blemish.
“Your scratches healed,” Paige said as she approached her, aware of the questioning gazes of her friends at her back.
“Makeup,” Tracy said with a shrug. “Could you show me around? I don’t know anyone else here.”
The whole situation felt off. Paige didn’t think it was normal for someone to switch schools with only two months left until summer break and she didn’t think that it was possible for anyone she knew to cover up scratch marks so perfectly.
But leaving Tracy to her own devices didn’t seem like a genuine option. Indeed, when Paige thought about it even remotely, she was astounded at how violently her mind rejected the idea.
“Sure,” she replied, offering her arm. Tracy curled her own around Paige’s bicep and when her bare fingers brushed against the skin where the sleeve of Paige’s blouse ended, Paige jolted.
It felt like something had stung her.
“Are you okay?” Tracy asked. Paige gently probed at the spot with her fingers but found no sign that anything strange had happened. There was no bite mark, no raised skin, no pain of any kind.
“I’m fine,” she murmured, adjusting her arm slightly. “Must have just been a bug.”
&.
They barely made it inside the school before Paige heard him.
“Hey, Krasikeva!”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t look back. She simply tightened her grip on Tracy's arm and kept walking forward, pointing out some of the rooms they passed. The nurse’s office, the bathroom that was always out of service because people smoked in it, the girl’s locker room.
“I think someone is trying to get your attention,” Tracy said as the bell rang.
“Ignore him,” Paige said, keeping her head high. “I’ll tell you about him later.”
His name was Derek Hale and in another universe, maybe, Paige could have seen herself liking him. But that was a universe where he didn’t make himself act far more stupid than he actually was, where his version of interacting with her went beyond making fun of her last name and trying to corner her by refusing to move until she could steal his basketball from him.
Maybe, in that universe, Paige would actually consider things.
But in the universe she currently inhabited, as soon as she met Tracy for lunch, Derek Hale reappeared and, sure enough, he was holding a basketball that practically stank of new leather.
“Are you not going to say hi to me today?” he asked, smirking in a way that Paige desperately wanted to wipe off his face.
“Hi,” she retorted. “Are you happy now?”
“I think you can do better than that.”
“And I think you should go find something else to do,” Tracy said from Paige’s side. Her voice was filled with the same ferocity from the weekend, when she’d so vehemently denied needing an ambulance and once again, Paige was taken aback. Derek, on the other hand, looked like he'd suddenly fallen sick; color visibly drained from his face and the ball plummeted from his fingers, bouncing and rolling across the cafeteria. His mouth opened and closed a number of times but nothing came out of it. Eventually, he simply turned and chased after the ball before crashing through the door leading out of the room.
“How did you do that?” Paige asked, feeling like the planet had somehow just shifted on its axis. Tracy just shrugged again, her face a mask of modesty that Paige thought she might be able to see through if she stared long enough.
“I don’t know,” Tracy replied. “Maybe he just needed someone else to tell him off. Is there pudding over there? I’ve never tried pudding before.”
With that, she wandered off and Paige was left staring at her back, wondering why she had goosebumps popping up on her arms.
The room wasn’t cold. And she wasn’t scared.
At least, she didn’t think so.
&.
Derek Hale did not speak to her for two months.
In the time that passed between the day he ran from the cafeteria and the day he walked into the music room after school, Paige had forgotten the days where Tracy had been anything but her best friend.
They were the very definition of inseparable. More often than not, Paige woke up to find Tracy asleep on her floor, curled up in a nest of sleeping bags and pillows. They studied together, ate dinner together, immediately picked each other as partners for assignments.
(Sometimes, a bell rang in the back of Paige’s mind, reminding her once again that something was off, that it was not possible for Tracy to be in all of her classes. That wasn’t how high school schedules worked.
All it took to silence that bell was for Tracy to smile or gently brush her fingers against Paige’s shoulder.)
She was aware, on some level at least, that she’d been close to others at some point. She felt their gazes while she walked around school, heard disparaging comments that she only slightly understood.
But she didn’t miss them. Truthfully, she didn’t have any concrete memories of these people, just wisps of thought that vanished when she tried to focus on them.
There was only Tracy.
(Tracy, who sometimes forgot words for the most commonplace of objects, who sometimes murmured to herself in a language Paige didn’t recognize, who never seemed to hold onto a bruise or a scratch for longer than a few hours.
Tracy, who was beautiful in a way that shouldn’t have been possible, whose eyes seemed to change color with the cycles of the moon, shifting from honey brown to a shimmering silver.
Tracy, who Paige loved and longed for with a depth that was frightening but felt like the most normal thing in the world.)
There was Tracy and there was her cello. She remained dedicated to her practice; the only difference was that most days, Tracy sat alongside her, working on a project or simply laying on her back, hair fanned around her, staring at the ceiling of the music room and gently waving her fingers through the air.
Sometimes she sang to herself and while she had the most beautiful voice Paige had ever heard, those practices always ended early when a migraine began to spiral through her head.
On one of the last days of school, she had the entire music room to herself. All of the other students were busy with exams and Tracy had excused herself before last period, saying that she had some family business to take care of.
Paige had never met Tracy’s family. Tracy said that they worked the night shift and slept during most of the day. Paige had never seen Tracy’s house, had never even walked her home.
But that was understandable, of course.
She had been playing for what felt like hours when she heard the door creak open behind her. She finished the song before she turned in her chair, flexing her fingers slightly.
Derek looked tired. Exhaustion was perhaps the better descriptor; his face was pale and bags hung underneath his eyes. He even walked differently; long gone was the cocky set of his shoulders, the assertive way he strode forward like the entire world was his for the taking.
Paige couldn’t help but think of a punished dog sneaking back into a room with his tail between his legs.
“Paige,” he said quietly, glancing back over his shoulder at the door, “where’s Tracy?”
“With her parents,” Paige replied warily, the echo of his taunting voice playing through her mind on a loudspeaker. “Why?”
“You have to stay away from her,” Derek replied. “I know that she looks innocent, that she looks beautiful, but she’s dangerous, Paige. More dangerous than anything you’ve ever met.”
Paige laughed, the sound bursting, exploding from her chest.
“Really, Derek? She’s ‘dangerous?’ Aren’t you just mad because she humiliated you?”
“No.” Derek said it firmly and his chest puffed up slightly, a shadow of the Hale she used to know. “She is dangerous, Paige. You must have noticed something strange about her.”
“No, I-”
“Think!” Derek interrupted, voice rising sharply. “C’mon Paige, you’re smarter than this. Think. There’s something weird about her, isn’t there?”
“No,” Paige repeated, but it came out quieter this time, unsure. She could feel a headache already beginning at her temples, its insidious fingers reaching towards the back of her skull.
Something wasn’t right. Something about Tracy didn’t make sense, simply didn’t work.
(She came from the trees.
Never go into the forest.)
“There's nothing strange about her,” Paige said through gritted teeth, although the words seemed to come from somewhere else, somewhere outside of her own body. “What would you know anyway?”
“I know that she came from the forest,” Derek replied. “I know that she screamed for help and that even though she was covered in blood, she healed impossibly fast. I know exactly what you know, but you’re trying so hard to forget.”
(“Do you want me to call an ambulance?”
“No!”)
“How do you know that?” Paige asked, fumbling for her head, which felt like it was about to crack in two. “Were you spying on me?”
“Two months ago, a faerie tried to kill my younger sister, Cora,” Derek said, a dark thunderstorm sliding over his face. “I hunted it to the edge of the forest and I tried to tear out its throat. But it got away. It managed to mask its true face and find you. That thing that has consumed your life is a murderer and now that I know who it is, I’m going to finish what I started.”
When Derek raised his head, Paige nearly toppled from her chair. The young man whose face she was so familiar with no longer stood before her. He’d been replaced by something with a prominent brow, vibrant golden eyes and fangs that jutted above his lower lip. Claws hung down from his long fingers, claws that looked like they would perfectly slot into someone’s throat.
“Stay away from her, Paige. I don’t want to hurt you.”
With that, Derek turned and slipped soundlessly through the door, no longer a slinking dog but a predator searching for blood. Paige was anchored to the spot, unable to so much as twitch, barely able to think through the pain that seemed all encompassing. What she had just seen simply couldn’t be possible.
Derek Hale wasn’t a werewolf. He simply wasn’t.
But regardless of whether or not his fangs were real (they weren’t, they couldn’t be), Paige was certain of one thing.
He meant to kill Tracy.
That thought pierced through the pain like a spear, spurring her into action. She dropped her bow to the ground and leaned her cello against the nearest wall before racing from the room. Even though Derek had left only moments before, there was no sign of him as she ran through the empty halls of the school and out the front door.
She had ridden her bike to school that morning but she left it anchored to the stand in the parking lot, even with the knowledge that it was likely to be either stolen or missing a tire come morning. She simply ran, concrete hard and unyielding under her pounding feet, hair streaming behind her.
She had no destination in mind. She just hoped that, somehow, on an unconscious level, her body would know where to go.
When she finally glanced up again, exhausted and sweating, she found herself standing in front of her own home.
It didn’t make sense, but she had no other ideas, so she skirted around the edge of the house to the backyard, inhaling deep gulps of the crisp air, thick with the last vestiges of spring.
Just before she collapsed on the ground, the trees rustled and she looked up to see Tracy emerge from the forest.
(Or, was it Tracy? Because for one single, solitary moment, barely longer than that of a heartbeat, Paige thought she saw someone, something else, something with long spindly fingers and tangled hair, something with sunken eyes and voluminous, ragged wings stretching towards the treetops.
But then she blinked again and it was only Tracy standing before her. Everything else must have been from the sweat in her eyes.)
“What were you doing in there?” Paige asked, looking back at the trees.
“What’s wrong?” Tracy replied, quickly (too quickly) crossing the space between them and laying her hands on Paige’s shoulders. “Were you running?”
“Derek Hale is going to kill you. He thinks you’re a faerie and he wants to rip out your throat and I…” She paused, panting heavily, and wrapped her arms around Tracy’s waist. “I think we should call the police.”
“No!” Tracy yelled and something clicked in the very back of Paige’s mind, something that was quickly forgotten when Tracy continued. “The police can’t stop him, Paige. He’s a werewolf. I’ve known it from the first moment I saw him.”
“But how?”
“It doesn’t matter! We have to hide from him. He’s going to find us sooner rather than later. There’s only one place we might lose him.” After a moment, Paige realized the meaning of Tracy’s words and her mother’s filled her head.
(Never go into the forest.)
“I can’t,” she said, glancing at the trees, which looked harmless in the daylight. “I can’t go in there. There are-”
“There’s a werewolf after me, Paige,” Tracy said, sliding her hands up Paige's shoulders to her neck. “He’s going to kill me. You don’t want that, do you?”
“No,” Paige said, meaning it more than anything she’d ever said. “No, of course not.”
“Then trust me,” Tracy said. She leaned forward slightly, until her forehead was braced against Paige’s. Tracy’s skin seemed far too cold for the time of the year, downright icy compared to Paige’s fever-hot brow. “We have to go into the forest. It’s the only place we’ll be safe.”
Before Paige could answer, Tracy erased the space between them by pressing their lips together. It was everything Paige had hoped and imagined that it would be while simultaneously being more. It felt like Tracy had just claimed her, had reached down into her chest and seized her soul with her hands.
By the time Paige pulled away with tingling lips and sore lungs, she knew one thing.
They had to enter the forest.
“We have to leave now,” Tracy said, squeezing Paige’s hands tightly. “He'll be here soon.”
“But we’ll be back,” Paige said, not resisting when Tracy turned and began walking them towards the treeline. “Won’t we?”
“Of course. We’ll be back as soon as Derek realizes he’s made a mistake,” Tracy said, voice rough around the edges. She pulled them towards the trees faster and although Paige could hear her mother’s voice in the back of her head, she felt no fear.
The forest was the only place to go.
As her foot stepped out of the grass for the first time in her life, she couldn’t help but smile.
“You know, I’ve always wondered what it was like in here.”
&.
There are things that live in the forest surrounding Beacon Hills.
Lost things that prowl through the darkness, haunted by memories they cannot fully recall, howling for those lost times. There are things that were never human and will never be human, things that live only to taste blood upon their tongue. There are creatures that speak in the language of the moon and creatures that speak only in the language of the dead.
But none of those are as dangerous as the faerie.