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Summer
Summer is easy. They don’t talk.
Allison and her dad take a road trip, because some of the most mundane times of their lives have been spent on the road, eating fast food and sleeping in motels between one town and a hunt and another. They stop at cheesy touristy destinations. They go to Niagra Falls. They don’t talk about Allison’s mother, and the empty house waiting for them back in Beacon Hills. They don’t talk about Gerard, and wherever he might be lurking. There’s one pistol and a single box of wolfsbane bullets in the car’s glove box. It never gets pulled out.
Stiles and his dad rebuild the back deck together, because everybody knows that good hard labor is the way to straighten a kid out. The lies sound gone, if the sheriff could trust that, could really quite believe they aren’t just that much better-told. They barbecue, and Stiles makes sure his dad gets a healthy serving of vegetables every night, and sometimes Scott comes over just like he used to. Nobody says a word about crime scenes or restraining orders, and when Stiles’ dad gets a phone call at the house, Stiles cranks up the volume on his video game and tunes it out.
Lydia ignores her parents just as much as ever. Jackson takes her to every nice restaurant, movie theater, bowling alley, public pool, lakeside beach, and backyard party in a forty-mile radius. They hold hands constantly, more than they ever have before, and take turns smirking and coming up with the most creative insults for everyone around them. On full moon nights, Lydia avoids bubble baths and books herself time at the spa, massage and facial and full-body waxing, until she’s tender and relaxed enough that she doesn’t even want to see Jackson. The day after, Jackson clutches her hand a little harder, and she doesn’t ask him. She doesn’t want to know. Not a single thing at all.
Fall
In fall, the alpha pack comes to town. They’re full of teeth and claws and bristling with challenges, and Scott doesn’t want a thing to do with them, but they want plenty to do with him. They corner him, whispering about the poor little Omega with his humans, with his mommy. They catch Stiles alone one night and toss him around in a circle, slicing him here and there with razor claws, nicking every so often the spot across the back of his neck where the kanima would always cut, making Stiles’ whole brain go blurry, until he’s no longer sure what happened next or how he got home that night or anything he said to his father in the week after.
In the fall, the hunters come to town. They’re on the trail of the alpha pack, but they won’t stop to take ID’s. They pile into Allison’s house, ignore her with identical sneers of disdain, and pile back out to set up in a farmhouse forty miles away, just outside the radius of plausible distance. There are nine of them, all armed to the teeth and ready to kill, and by the look on Allison’s father’s face, they don’t pretend to follow the Code.
In the fall, Jackson dies.
Jackson’s a lone wolf, nobody by his side but Lydia. He’s too easy to find, to catch, to poison, to rip to shreds. It’s all too easy. The hunters lure him out to the woods one night, with Lydia in chains and their whispers of magic. They throw arrows and fire at him while he growls. It’s only the second time Lydia’s ever seen him covered in fur, fanged and clawing so desperate.
It only lasts a few short minutes before the first howls of the alpha pack head their way. The hunters scatter. Lydia struggles against her bonds, pulls and tugs her ankles free. Jackson glances over his shoulder one last time, then takes off in the direction of the howls. She never sees the alpha pack that night. She makes it back to her car in time.
In the fall, they find Jackson’s body, all-too-human, mauled like another mountain lion’s on the loose. Allison bites her lip, soft and uncertain, and Stiles clenches and unclenches his fist, tight enough to break, and Lydia, brittle and perfect as glass, puts on her makeup and says nothing at all.
Winter
Wintertime, the pack leaves.
Hunters follow Scott home and Allison’s father finds the alpha pack’s sign outside his door. Stiles is almost run off the road twice. But nobody cared about Lydia, once Jackson was dead; nobody’s looked at Erica or Boyd’s families twice. Derek gathers what’s barely worth calling a pack together, and they leave.
Scott hugs Stiles even tighter than Allison, because Allison closes up and turns away too fast. “I’ll take care of your mom,” Stiles promises, and Scott says, “yeah, you’d better,” and that’s the last they say to each other for months.
Wintertime cold has Lydia showing up at Allison’s too-big, too-empty house with an overnight bag in hand, one night after another, and nobody in the world objects. The house is too loud and too echoingly quiet, and the spaces where Allison and her father don’t talk are much too full and open. Lydia spends her nights in the guest room where Kate stayed, the guest room where Gerard lived, and once again Allison does not sleep in the room where her mother died. Eventually Lydia makes it all the way down the hall, where Allison can pull her into a bed made warmer for holding two.
Wintertime lets Lydia ask the questions she would not ask in the summer and needed to know in the fall. Allison and Stiles look at each other for no words at all, before they load her into a car and drive her out to the old Hale place. Stiles knows little sparks of magic that Lydia can mix and use like chemistry. Allison was born holding a recurved bow. They’re both impressively competent with a handgun.
Allison has a bestiary handed down from one relative she never wants to know to another, Stiles has six months’ of hard-won notes, and Lydia has every last brain cell she’s never admitted to carrying. They have Google.
Dr. Deaton won’t help them, but Ms. Morrell will.
They grab each other and make their notes, practice their tricks. Stiles splits his knuckles open, throwing practice punches at a smooth-barked birch tree, and keeps going, because his form is good and neither Lydia nor Allison will make him stop. Lydia scorches away all the hair below her forearms and wrists, but she won’t go home for anyone to notice. Allison hasn’t had string callouses like these since she was a little girl first learning, and she layers new blisters from the grip of her knives over the top of them, hardening into scar.
Wintertime has no plan. There’s not a whisper of hunter or pack. There's just the whistle of an arrow through the trees, and the sparrows and the winter wrens, and the shushh of the wind.
Spring
Spring brings the anniversary of the first time Jackson died. Spring brings Lydia to Danny Mahealani’s door.
“We need you to find someone,” she says, and Danny says, “no.” Lydia says, “Jackson would want—” and Danny says, “is this about all that,” and Lydia says, “it’s always about that, Daniel Mahealani. Do this for me.”
Spring brings Stiles a hundred and fifty miles north to a little logging town in Oregon, wrapped in magic and oils to disguise his presence until Isaac ventures into town with a bag of dirty laundry.
“Was hoping they’d send you on the next pizza run,” Stiles says, and “Scott would never be able to keep his mouth shut.” Isaac says, “how did you find us,” and Stiles says, “Derek’s not really trying all that hard to cover his tracks, and oh yeah, he’s using a credit card with his own name on it,” and Isaac says, “If you want me to take you to them,” and Stiles says, “Nah. I want an update on how things are going, and I want your new cell phone number, and I don’t want them ever to find out I was here.”
Spring brings Allison hesitantly to the study where her father’s been running as legitimate a business as he knows how.
“What do you know about the Jager hunters?” she asks, and her father says, “no.” Allison says, “we just need to know what—” and Chris says, “do not get involved, Allison, they’re dangerous and they don’t keep the code,” and she says, “we’ll just find out ourselves if you don’t tell us,” and Chris says, “there’s nothing to tell, now leave it alone.”
Spring also brings Allison and Lydia to bed together, in the safe gathering dark. It takes too much courage to be afraid, in the sun, where anyone can see. They curl together in a place where it doesn’t need so much strength to be weak, where Allison can stroke Lydia’s hair and they both can finally sleep.
“Jackson used to do that,” Lydia says, “after sex, when he was too happy to remember that cuddling wasn’t cool,” and Allison says, “oh,” and, “I’m sorry,” and Lydia says “no, don’t.” Allison says “I miss Scott,” and Lydia says “I misssex,” and they share smiles that are invisible in the dark until their mouths bump together, for the first time. They map the rest out entirely by touch.
Spring is filled with Isaac’s texts, each a little tighter and more worried than the last, and with news of the Jager group dancing and poking around the pack’s fringes, closer and closer. It takes a while, one month, maybe two, but it brings Lydia and Stiles and Allison to the kitchen table at Stiles’ house while his father is off working.
Sooner or later Derek is going to snap and kill one of them, Isaac’s text says, and Allison says, “would that be so bad?”, too honest to be a hypothetical, and none of them can disagree with it.
Stiles says, “if Derek or Isaac or Scott pull one of those hunters down, it’s like a black guy in 1968 Alabama getting beaten by the cops until he shoots one in self-defense, and in this case the riots don’t stop until all three of them are dead.” He says, “if a werewolf kills a human, it’s war.” Then, while they sit there quiet, he says, “if a human kills another human, it’s just murder.”
No one says anything, until Lydia uncurls her hand and lays it open on the table, half-moon fingernail cuts clear on her palm. Lydia says, “I could be okay with that.”
Spring brings rain, and fog, like the one that cloaks their hundred-mile road trip up to the weathered old rented farmhouse where all nine of the Jager hunters are staying. The house is quiet; the hunters are out, every last one. The doors are locked, but it’s surprisingly easy to slide a set of picks into the front door keyhole and work until something clicks. It’s surprisingly easy to break in across lines of mountain ash meant to keep out werewolves, past silver charms in all the windows and smears of aconite oil on all the door knobs.
They wear gloves on the doorknobs because fingerprints are foolish, and because aconite is perfectly poisonous to humans, in the right dose. How foolish of them, these famous deadly hunters, to keep the vials of oil right there in their pantry next to the flour and cinnamon and coffee grounds.
In the spring, Stiles and Allison and Lydia bring clever fingers and deadly poison into the home of their enemies, and the bodies fall like still-warm rain. There’s enough magic to keep the first from dropping until the last of the hunters has drunk. There’s enough magic to re-build the line of mountain ash, so every hunter anywhere will know, it was no wolf that made this happen.
The newspapers say NINE DEAD IN MYSTERIOUS SUICIDE CULT, and the sheriff says, “I’ll be home late, they need to consult, that whole cult’s credit card and cell phone history puts them in Beacon Hills all last summer,” and Chris Argent doesn’t say anything at all.
Summer
Summer is easy. They don’t talk.
The pack is safe and not-safe, searching for Boyd and Erica, playing cat and mouse with what’s left of the alpha pack. Isaac doesn’t send as many texts. He sent a Thanks.
Chris will not look Allison in the eye, and she does not try to force him. Allison is not the first Argent to leave a whole house full of people dead with no remorse. Chris does not say, you are not your aunt. He does not say, you are your mother. Nobody ever controlled Victoria. Nobody wise ever tried.
Stiles avoids the sheriff and lets the sheriff avoid him. They pass each other in the halls, and Stiles hides his bruises well. The sheriff has stopped asking who are you?, and Stiles doesn’t have to say, apparently, I’m a killer. This is the first time that he’s ever been sure, if his father knew everything, he’d be ashamed rather than proud.
Lydia goes home. She stares at her face in the mirror that replaced the one she broke with a hand that knows the feel of throwing a much better punch, now. She leaves without a word to her mother.
Lydia finds Stiles and Allison. She says, “I want you to help me find and kill Peter Hale.” Allison and Stiles don’t need to bother talking about whether to agree. They all know.
They’re together on this.