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Vampires have no scent of their own, did you know? Stiles figures it out when he’s six because mom’s hair smells like the cinnamon buns she baked for the neighbors and his throat tingles at the smell of blood when he kisses her cheek but there’s nothing else, not like Scott and his mom who both smell like sugar cookies and antiseptic and fear but only on thursdays when Mr. McCall doesn’t work.
She tells him it’s so they blend in because you saw what happened to aunty and you don’t want that to happen to us, do you baby? And he shakes his head and dips his fingers into an old carton of juice in the fridge and wipes them on the inside of his shirt so he’ll smell like apples and mom smiles and kisses his head.
The hunters catch her two days later and Aaron finds Stiles in the kitchen, fingers covered in skin and cinnamon where he’s been scrubbing it into his hair, mouth open around bulging teeth and the desperate animal wails he can’t contain. He grips his son tight, tucks the rounded fronts of his fangs against Stiles’ forehead like his wife had when he’d been a bloody mouthed baby.
Pretending to breathe is so much harder with the grief sticking in his throat like syrup and he doesn’t feed for two weeks, turns his head away from the offered arms and screams at the soundproof walls like the pain will fly out of him and splatter across them.
But then, dad finds the hunters that smell like the cinnamon from mom’s hair and brings them to the basement and Stiles still can’t breathe but there’s an ache in his belly like he’s going to rip himself apart so he rips them apart instead. When he blurs back into awareness there’s a hot chunk of muscle in his mouth from where he tore through the woman’s ribcage and dad has part of the man’s eye stuck to his chin.
Stiles crawls through the blood to press close to dad, drags his claws over the male hunter’s bared skull. Grief still clogs his throat but the satisfaction of their revenge settles somewhere in his spine and it feels like he’ll never be happy again but his cousins seem alright so he picks the piece of eye off dad’s cheek and touches his fangs to his jaw.
It’s his birthday tomorrow. He’ll be seven and his dad will have spent a few hours making his candles out of the dead hunters’ bones.