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Lying to a werewolf was a bad idea, but she figured nothing could be worse than dying. Allison wondered if Scott could hear the lie in her voice, or if her trembling, her shock, had confused his senses. Then she slipped into blackness, and if she was relieved, she hoped he didn’t smell it.
Je suis désolée, mais tu ne peux pas partir maintenant, mon enfant.
And Allison was in a world of white. All white, except for the Nemeton, where a woman just a little older than she was sat there, waiting for her. Allison’s legs pulled her forward without her consent, and she stepped onto the stump of the tree with a bare foot, taking another two steps before she could sit down with the woman.
It was like looking in a funhouse mirror. The woman had blue eyes like her dad, and her face was thinner, jawline not as sharp – not that that was hard. Lydia once called her features striking, and Allison figured she was right. This woman looked more like Kate, dark hair curlier than Allison’s had ever been. She looked like she could be Allison’s sister, maybe.
« Pas ta sœur, Allison Frédérique Victoire Caitrín Argent. Je m’appelle Alice-Claire Joan Marie Trinette Argent. Tu ne me connais pas ? Je suis ton arrière-grand-mère. J’étais la dernière mère des Argents. Tu ne me comprends pas ? »
Allison opened her mouth to explain that she didn’t speak French all that well, and that Alice-Claire spoke too fast for her to understand what she was saying anyway, but Alice-Claire smirked and held up her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said, accent thick but words coming easily. “I’m your great grandmother. I was, at least. And I was the last mère des Argents. I only had sons – a conjurer cursed me. I’m sorry. But the old ways were dying anyway.”
“Why are we here?” Allison asked. Limbo wasn’t a place for the dead, and she knew she was dead. No one human could have recovered from her injuries. And Alice-Claire had been dead since before her dad had been born. Gerard said that it had been a hunt gone wrong, but now Allison wondered if he hadn’t made that happen.
Alice-Claire shrugged, the fabric of her dress rippling like water over her skin. It didn’t look very practical for hunting, Allison noted clinically. It exposed her legs and could get caught on a stray branch, which could get her killed.
But they were already dead. Right. It was hard to believe that when everything felt real.
“I believe it may be the links dangling from your hands keeping you here. As for myself, I’m stuck here until Gerard dies. I approve of the method your lover used to kill him. It is slow and more painful than the cancer a friend of mine struck him with.” She smiled, and she looked like Kate. Allison didn’t swallow, but she looked down at her hands, which were uncovered, even if her hair was braided back. Sure enough, on either wrist two bands stretched from her to the Nemeton, disappearing into it.
They looked like braids. Alpha red, silver, and dark cherry, blood red, twined together. The silver was a shock wherever she saw it, maybe because the other two colors wrapped around her wrists like bracelets.
Scott and Stiles. She felt their absence all at once, and tears choked her. When she rubbed them away, she couldn’t even feel the echoes of the bond.
“That was stupid, you know,” her great-grandmother said, but she was smiling. “And as brave as any Argent has to be. I would have done the same, if I didn’t know that Druids manipulate everything to their advantage.” She scoffed at Allison’s shocked stare. “Alan Deaton may be a good man, but Druids believe their actions protect the balance between the supernatural and human worlds. And Beacon Hills has been unbalanced since they cut down the Beacon itself.”
Something clicked in Allison’s head, like a lock finally turning under her fingers.
“Lydia’s a banshee,” she said.
Alice-Claire nodded.
“Powerful, young, and all too willing to give into instinct when her logic cannot overcome raw force – and the nogitsune has been waiting for an opportunity to rise for a long time. I doubt Alan believed you would die, considering your friend’s force of will, but – you must understand something about your friend that a Druid never could. He was untested. Conjurers have some power beforehand, but without the tests, their magic is unstable. Erratic. It can kill them, if they use it without knowing what they are, in their souls. And the Druids didn’t know what he was.”
The fact that Stiles was a conjurer should have surprised her, but she put together the little things – how he’d known what Scott was before he did, the near-miracle he’d pulled off when they killed Peter the first time, how his ears had turned red when he saw her the day after she and Scott first slept together before Scott told him, the way he shrugged off concussions like they were nothing, the line of mountain ash that he shouldn’t have been able to make – and everything slotted together. Like magic.
“What is he, other than a conjurer?” Deaton had to have known that, at least.
Alice-Claire’s eyes narrowed. She cocked her head, like she was listening to someone else, and maybe she was.
“He is a Jastrzebski. He can consume energy, even souls. He will do this. Every one of his children will be like him, excepting his firstborn. You will have to train her when the time comes. I’m sorry.”
Allison didn’t have a chance to ask why she was sorry, or how she could train someone when she was dead, because everything disappeared.
And the world curled in and around her. Lines of ink ran up her arms, and a sick feeling in her gut told her what was happening. There were riddles on her arms, written in languages she shouldn’t have understood. A spiral from the center of her, where she had been killed, a maze that was her, but spread to the Nemeton, past it, all of Limbo turned into a labyrinth.
Sudden knowledge spread through her, everything a mère des Argents knew about the world, about hunting and gods and creatures so terrifying that people had turned them into funny stories. But in the front of her mind was a memory that was almost a fairy-tale.
The woman was standing in a forest clearing, in the middle of a fairy ring. The trees were mountain ash, planted years before, nettles and peppermint and wolfsbane and lilies and mint and rosemary. Outside the ring there was a bowl filled to the brim with blood and wine, and a patch of wet earth. There was a bow, heavy, across her back, enchantments inscribed there by a friend. She had cut her palm, and her daughter’s, consuming part of the libation before offering the rest.
Her daughter stood beside her, still inside the fairy ring. Neither of them were afraid, or surprised, when a man and woman approached them. If they had decided to kill them, they would already be dead.
Instead, the bowl disappeared as the two stood beside it. They both wore bows and quivers, and even in the twilight they were awful to behold, they were so beautiful. They could simply show their true forms, and the humans would burn to ash.
“Yes,” they said together. The woman continued alone. “There is a cost, and you know its nature. Do you accept it?”
It was dusk, and they both nodded their assent.
“Then take the gifts, you and your allies, but do not forget the cost. You must die by mortal means, not by claws or spells or blades of magic, or you will become a stranger monster than the creature that kills you, silver-souled mother. This will pass down to all of your daughters. And should they dare to touch magic, only magic will pull them from death, if it can.”
As swiftly as they had appeared, they vanished, and the two shuddered with the knowledge poured into them like wine into cups.
Allison saw Scott and Stiles, and she cried because they would all have been stuck here if they’d chosen the wrong Allison, but also because she could feel the links that bound them together.
It seemed like a moment after they disappeared that the night tore itself apart, Void’s power changed, the Nemeton curled up around her like a cocoon until she whispered through it, her body insubstantial unless she wanted it to be real. She wanted to be real again, and she sucked in cold air like she still needed to breathe.
She had to sit down as, suddenly, her senses expanded. She felt everyone in Beacon Hills, human and not, souls ringing like bells in her ears, a baroque symphony. But, that at the back of her mind, she checked for the bond, looked at her wrists and smiled before she leaned back against the Beacon, one hand touching her stomach, one on the tree. It promised protection, and love, and acceptance, but Allison’s eyes burned.
She couldn’t stay. She hugged Scott and Stiles, who knew as well as she did that she couldn’t just walk into school after very publicly dying. She let Lydia see her, held her hand and cried with her, and then she walked away from all the people she knew needed protection.
But she’d fought with a sword before, and Beacon Hills had a True Alpha, a banshee, and a conjurer who loved it too.
She’d come back someday, she promised herself, and walked into the shadows, her great grandmother’s laughter ringing in her ears.