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Stiles leans on his holy water soaked hardwood spear and wipes the blood off of his face as he catches his breath. “There were more of them than I expected,” he says, looking around at the bodies. There are a good two dozen vampires scattered across the floor of the abandoned subway station where Derek had once lurked.
Peter is attempting to clean off his hands—soaked in gore up to the elbows—with a handkerchief that is comically small for the job. Eventually he sighs and tosses it into a pool of blood. “This wasn’t a scouting party,” Peter says. “They’d already moved in.”
“This is why I need more extensive wards,” Stiles grumbles. He and Peter exchange pained glances; they’ve been trying to convince Scott to expand the wards for months, but Deaton is adamant that such a network would be ‘unbalanced.’
“If we—” Peter begins, but breaks off abruptly when a thin, high wail rings through the air.
Stiles frowns, turning toward that noise. “Is that a baby? It sounds like a baby.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Peter says, sighing. He starts towards the car at the back of the station. “It cries like a baby, but it sounds like a vampire. No heartbeat.”
Stiles follows him. There’s no crib in the car, but there is a bassinet. The baby’s face is scrunched up with its cries, but it’s not flushed red and there are teeny tiny fangs poking out of its mouth. They’re almost cute. “If vampires don’t age,” Stiles says, looking down at it, “does that mean this is an eternal baby.”
“No.” Peter rubs his chin as he considers the child. “Like werewolves, vampires can be either born or made. Turned vampires stop aging with the change, but born vampires age normally for some years and then simply… stop. No one is quite sure what controls their apparent age; some resemble teenagers, some resemble the elderly, and everything in between.”
“Huh.”
They stare at the baby for a minute.
“I’m not killing a baby,” Stiles says eventually.
“It’s not my first choice, either,” Peter says, “but we’ve already killed its entire clan.”
“Well, you know what the proverb says,” Stiles says, putting his hands on his hips. “When you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for it.”
“(A) There’s no such proverb, and (B) we didn’t save the baby’s life,” Peter argues. “Actually, it would be more accurate to say that we endangered it.”
But Stiles is already scooping the baby vampire out of the bassinet. When he rests its head on his shoulder, the child turns and sinks its tiny fangs into his throat. “Ow,” Stiles says, but doesn’t try to dislodge them.
Peter sighs.