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He'd thought distance would help; that, somehow, if he ran as far as he could from Beacon Hills, he could evade her.
It was a stupid, futile hope.
Her anger is too vast, and its reach too far. No matter where he goes, he can feel her; feel the questing tendrils of her mind, hunting, always hunting.
He's in a market in some quaint East European town when she catches up with him this time; one second, the vendor is telling him how much he owes for the pirogi, and the next he's staring at him with cold, green eyes.
"The female of the species is more deadly than the male," the vendor tells him, speaking with Peter's own voice, and the market falls instantly silent, and Peter doesn't need to turn around to know he'll find everyone staring at him, icy fury in their green eyes. He's been here before.
He runs.
He runs, the vendor yelling after him, line after line from "The Female Of The Species" until Peter can't hear him over the sound of his own beating heart, his own tortured lungs, and he keeps running until he falls.
Her shoes is the first thing he sees; her pretty, bloodstained shoes as she stands on the ruin of a gravestone.
"Did you miss me, Mister?" she asks, and when he looks up, she's just as he remembers her, beautiful and bloodstained and terrible.
Her name slips out through clenched teeth, somewhere halfway between a terrified whisper and a sigh of relief. "Lydia..."
"Girls hate men who kiss and leave," she tells him as she crouches down to drag bloody fingers through his hair, and his eyes slip shut under her touch. "You should take responsibility for your actions, Peter. A fragile little girl like me... Who knows what she could do when she's been hurt?"
When he opens his eyes again, he's lying on grass, spotlights focused on him as panic that isn't his crawls up his throat, as his fingers - slender and feminine and pale - dig into the earth, false nails snapping off as he struggles, and Lydia's hands are on his legs, up his skirt, dragging him backwards into her, her breath blood-hot against his cheek, and oh God, her touch burns, light his skin on fire until he's consumed by it, until his nostrils are full of the smell of burning hair and cooking flesh, and he can hear his skin sizzle and pop as it melts, and still her hands are on him, his hips,
holding him down
down
down into the ashes and the dirt and the worms
teeth digging into his side, ripping and tearing
breath filling his insides with purple flowers
and they grow towards the sunlight of her wrath, fed by the waters of her pain, and
he's rotting
rotting
from the inside out and he can hear her speaking, softly
(to him or the flowers, he can't tell)
"One day, the girl having finally lost all hope of escape, she agrees to marry the Beast.
There is no marriage ceremony;
only an agreement
a veil
and a wedding night.
And on that night, she lay with him and she
becomes
like
him
a Beast
forever."