Chapter Text
4
On his perch atop the mountain, he could see the sun rising long before the Winchesters would be able to. Cas smiled. So much beauty, it almost tore his heart to pieces.
And it was nothing compared to the beauty found in humanity. The angel thought of one member of the human race in particular.
“Still running away every chance you get, I see.” Meg sat down beside him. “Makes me wonder why you follow them around like a lost puppy.”
Her words were thorns on a rose, and he told her as much. She rolled her eyes.
“I mean it, Cas. You don’t have to come to their every beck and call if you don’t want to. Aren’t you all about freewill now?”
“They’re my friends, “ he explained patiently, letting a grin spread across his face. “Why shouldn’t I help them?”
“Because they don’t ever help you. When you were comatose they just left you—”
“But they made sure you were there to look out for me.”
“They left you with a demon they barely trusted.” Her voice was not accusatory, only sad, tinged with pity. “They use you when it’s convenient. I’ve seen how he treats you.”
Neither had to say his name to know who they were talking about. “He’s human and flawed. I don’t have to defend my actions to you.”
“I know you don’t. I’m not asking you to.” Meeting his eyes, she gently took his hand. “I just want you to be happy.”
They sat and spoke for a while, until long after the sun had risen even for the Winchesters, but Cas never stopped listening and waiting for a prayer, a call.
“So these Winchester guys, you really think Erica is safe with them?” Isaac speared a piece of pancake but didn’t eat it.
The pack was at IHOP; the place was full of the morning crowd, giving them more lee-way with talking about awkward werewolf things. The background noise was enough to cover their words.
Derek had only ordered coffee. “They won’t hurt her unless they find out what she is. These people have major savior complexes, all they do is help people.” He’d been shocked to learn that the demon hunters had been the legendary Winchesters, but Erica’s text had been very specific on that account. At least they were sure to know how to get Stiles back safely.
“That’s just what you’ve heard. The truth could be different.” Scott hadn’t even bothered to order a cup of coffee. He just sat there, almost as fidgety as Stiles would have been, worrying about his best friend and his pack-mate. “Why don’t we all go over there, ambush them, make them tell us what they know?”
Derek hoped his scathing glare was enough to convey to Scott how monumentally foolish that would be, but erring on the side of caution, he elaborated, “If you want to be hunted to the ends of the earth by two of the most dangerous men on the planet, be my guest. I’ll have no part in it.” He was being sarcastic about allowing Scott to do that, of course. He would tie the beta down if need be, not only for the pack’s sake, but for Scott’s, too.
If Erica failed, if it came to losing Stiles to a demon forever or showing himself to men who would certainly kill him, he would keep the rest of the pack out of it. Scott would assume alpha-hood, things would move on. Derek didn’t have a death-wish, though, so he would exhaust all other possibilities first.
Across the restaurant, Lydia and Alison were walking through the doors. The former looked haughty as always, though this morning she seemed extra proud of herself.
They joined the pack at the table. “Good morning, my humanly-challenged friends,” Jackson rolled his eyes as Lydia spoke, “I went to the place you told me about. For being werewolves, you sure are blind.” She put two little boxes on the table.
“What’s that?” Boyd asked, reaching forward to touch one.
“Ah, ah, ah, first, I found out what that symbol was. It’s called a devil’s trap.”
“It catches demons,” Alison elaborated, “If you get one into the circle, they can’t leave until it’s broken.”
“Then what’re the boxes for?”
Derek was tired of waiting for Lydia to get to the point; Stiles’s life wasn’t a toy to be played with. Opening the box, he saw an odd assortment of things, but most interesting was the picture of one of the brothers.
“You use it to summon a demon to sell your soul.”
“Doesn’t, like, the devil do that sort of thing?” Isaac asked, finally continuing to eat his pancakes.
Lydia rolled her eyes. “How should I know? That’s just what the internet said about it. So we know what the demon who possessed Stiles is doing. The brothers must have tricked it into showing up, but then over-eager here chased them off,” she gave Derek an exasperated look.
He became irrationally angry at her accusation, but part of the anger was at himself. “I didn’t know. I saw Stiles, I saw men with guns. What would you have done?”
“Probably flirted with them until I got what I want,” she rejoined airily. “Too late to change the past now. Let’s just hope they fall for Erica’s act.”
“Yeah, let’s just sit and eat fucking pancakes while Stiles—” Scott clenched his fists, turning away from the others, unable to finish the thought. Alison carefully touched his arm and he relaxed.
“Erica learned from the best.” Jackson shot Derek an unkind look. “She’ll find the info. Your obnoxious BFF will be back here bothering us in no time.”
Picking up his coffee, Derek hoped Jackson’s cavalier words would prove true. He stared out the window for a long moment, ignoring the cup in his hands, wondering where the missing human member of his pack was.
“You have matching tattoos. What do they mean?”
Erica was sitting in the uncomfortable desk chair provided by the motel, watching Sam pull his shirt off before heading to the shower. She hadn’t slept at all that night, both because of her worry for Stiles and the lingering fear that she’d wake up with a knife in her throat. When she was sure the brothers were sound asleep, she’d searched their bags and found an alarming assortment of weaponry and a leather-bound journal that was full of entries about various mythical creatures and monsters.
When she couldn’t find the info she wanted after a few minutes, she decided the risk was too high and went back to pretending to sleep. This morning she would have to figure something out. She’d decided to go with the little-sister approach; trying to get into their pants was an all-or-nothing thing, and they were kinda old so she wasn’t sure they’d even be interested. They didn’t seem the type to sleep with a barely-legal high school girl right after meeting her.
“Oh, yeah, uh,” Sam was clearly trying to think of a plausible lie.
“Does it have something to do with the monster?” She very carefully didn’t say the word demon. They had to broach that topic first. The symbol wasn’t like the one they’d scorched into the road, but it had to be similar.
“No.” At first Erica thought his brevity was an annoyed dismissal, but after a moment he elaborated. “It’ll sound crazy, but then you’ve already seen crazy. It’s an anti-possession sigil.”
“Possession? Like, by demons and ghosts and stuff? There’s more than just monsters—?”
“You don’t wanna know. Trust me.”
Erica did know a great deal about what went bump in the night; she’d read the entire Argent bestiary. But the fear in her eyes was not entirely feigned. If Stiles could be taken so easily, who else could be lost?
“H-how likely is a person to be possessed?” she ventured. Time was running out, she needed to push a little.
“For you? Next to zero. But in our line of work—well, it’s been a problem.” He smiled ruefully.
“What happens if you get possessed? Is it like The Exorcist? Do you stay possessed forever?”
Before Sam could answer, the door opened and Dean walked in; he was carrying three cups of coffee and a bag of donuts. Pausing just inside the room, he eyed Sam’s lack of shirt then glanced at Erica.
“Sam was just telling me about your tattoos. So are you guys like Buffy or something?” Playing dumb was an art-form. You had to walk a razor’s edge between too stupid to be trusted and too smart for your own good. She was a pro.
Dean laughed. “Not exactly. We should get you home after breakfast. That thing won’t live to see another dawn, you don’t have to worry.”
“But what if there’s more? Is there an anti-monster charm you can give me?”
“If there are more, we’ll take care of them, too.” His voice was hard in a way that clearly ended the discussion.
Erica smiled at them as if comforted, but her heart thudded away in her chest, and she feared for Derek and the rest of the pack for the first time since learning there might be new hunters in the neighborhood.
They’re dropping me off at home. No luck finding a remedy. I’m so sorry :(
Derek read the text message with waning hope.
“What’s wrong?” Scott was sometimes too observant when it came to the subtle changes in the alpha’s facial expressions.
“They’re cutting her loose. She failed.” He wasn’t angry with her; he knew she would have done everything short of tying them up and torturing them to get the information.
“What now?”
He and Scott were alone in his car, headed to the woods to try to track Stiles. “We keep looking.”
Scott’s plans didn’t always work out perfectly, but he’d learned to listen to his instincts. And now they were telling him that trusting the Winchesters was the only way to save his best friend.
They’d tried summoning the demon to the crossroads but nothing happened. Either the demon had access to Stiles’s memories and knew their faces or it was lying low entirely. Scott tried not to think of the possibility that it could have left town altogether.
Throughout the day Derek had grown more and more irritable, snapping at everyone for the slightest annoyances. Scott knew that he was going to do something stupid, and no one was going to stop him if the beta didn’t himself.
That was why Scott was standing there in the parking lot of the motel, watching the Winchester’s room. Their car was there, which meant they likely were as well. He crept forward carefully, until he was close enough to try to listen in on their conversation.
“Dean, stop worrying about him.”
“What? Worrying about who?”
“Come on, you’ve been staring at the TV and frowning for the last hour. You’re not even paying attention to what’s on. Cas is fine, you know he wanders around. But he’ll be back when we need him. Always is.”
“I’m just watching TV—”
“You’re watching a Lifetime movie.” Scott heard the sound of an old television being turned off.
“Okay, fine, let’s go kill some werewolves and find out what Meg is up to and maybe Cas will show up and maybe he won’t. I don’t care.”
Scott didn’t know these guys beyond what Erica had told everyone, but Dean seemed really hung up about whoever the hell Cas was; maybe a boyfriend or something. He was relieved to know that even hunters of their caliber had relationship problems.
Taking a deep breath, Scott walked up to their motel door, knocking politely. The brothers’ conversation stopped; he heard them cock guns and move slowly towards the door. Around that time Scott began to question the wisdom of his plan.
“Who the hell are you?” Dean had answered the door. Scott couldn’t see a gun, but he also couldn’t see both the man’s hands.
“I’m Scott McCall. Erica’s friend. I need your help.”
“Is she okay?” Sam came to the door, looking more concerned than his older brother.
“Yeah, she’s fine, but our friend—his name’s Stiles—we think he’s been possessed by a demon. You have to help.”
“What makes you think he’s been possessed by a demon?” Dean leaned against the doorframe.
“There was sulfur around his room and he disappeared from in front of me. He’s been taken and we have to get him back.”
“What does he look like?” Sam asked.
Scott got out his phone and found a picture, then showed them.
“That’s the demon at the crossroads.”
Sam nudged his brother out of the doorway, then motioned for Scott to enter. “Come in. We’re trying to find your friend, too. The demon that possessed him has been running amok.”
The Winchesters were imposing, dangerous-looking, and Scott could smell the gunpowder and old dried blood on their possessions. He wasn’t eager to get trapped in a motel room with them, but as long as he didn’t tell them what he was no problems would arise. Giving the brothers what he hoped was a grateful smile, he walked into the room, letting the door close behind him.
“Can you find him tonight? His dad’s beginning to worry.” Mr. Stilinski was more than worried—he was suspicious. He’d called Scott earlier that afternoon to ask him where Stiles was and why he wasn’t answering his phone. Scott had told the only plausible lie he could think of: he’d said Stiles was out on a date with Erica.
He made a mental note to tell her to lie if the sheriff asked. Stiles would forgive him for the deception. Scott knew Stiles had no interest in dating Erica; he was fairly certain who the teen was mooning after. When they rescued him from the demon, he’d have to ask Stiles why he was keeping his crush on Derek a secret from Scott—it wasn’t like he’d judge him. The beta thought it mostly that Stiles wasn’t hung up on the fact that Derek was a guy, more that Derek was, well, Derek. Liking Lydia had been humiliating enough over the years for Stiles. He was probably afraid of more rejection and wanted to weather it on his own.
“We’ll try,” Sam answered. “He’s working with another demon that we know. We’re going to try summoning her.”
Scott felt his phone vibrate; he glanced at the caller: Derek. Ignoring it, he turned his full attention back to the hunters. “Can you summon Stiles? And then, like, exorcise him or whatever?” He felt his phone ring again, and with it came a wave of acute anger from his alpha. “Sorry—hold on, I have to take this.”
Giving an apologetic smile to the brothers, he moved to the other side of the room and snapped, “Yeah, what is it? Kinda busy here.”
“We captured Stiles. I need you here now to help figure this out—”
“I’m with the Winchesters, you know, those guys who saved Erica,” Scott knew the hunters were listening in, so he continued to pretend he was a normal human. “I’ll bring them to where the demon is. They’ll know how to fix him.” He glanced at the brothers for confirmation; they were already putting on their coats. “How did you manage to catch it?”
He heard the phone change hands, then Lydia was speaking, proud as a peacock. “I realized that we needed someone Stiles didn’t know to summon the demon, so I paid some boy at school to do it. The demon’s kind of stupid, fell for the same trap that was activated with a match.”
Scott was smiling in admiration. “Thanks, wow, we’ll be there as soon as we can. Where are you?”
Derek was having a bit of a bad day. He hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, had hardly eaten anything in that time, and had spent a good deal of it in alpha form. He’d berated himself when it took Lydia and Alison to come up with a viable plan, but he was beyond frazzled at the loss of Stiles. Derek tried not to wonder what that meant exactly, letting the reason that Stiles was a valuable asset be enough to explain away his near-panic.
But now the demon was standing in front of him, trapped, and soon Stiles would be free. It should be easy now, simply a matter of waiting.
The demon was speaking, though, and as one would imagine, it wasn’t spreading words of joy and comfort.
“So you’re Derek.” The thing’s voice was sly, simpering almost. Using Stiles’s voice, his lips and tongue to form those words, was more enraging than Derek could have imagined. “I feel like I know you myself. I have access to all this meat-suit’s memories, you understand.” It put Stiles’s hands in his pockets, posture casual, relaxed though it was trapped. “And oh, some of those memories. They’d make you blush.”
The rest of the pack was there besides Scott, even Alison and Lydia had decided to stay to see it through. Everyone wanted Stiles back. Derek wished there were a way to shut the demon up, but he couldn’t hurt it, only the body it was occupying. Doing the only thing he could, he stared the demon down, giving it his best angry glare.
“Some things would make everyone here blush. Oh! While we’re waiting for your little friend to bring the Winchesters here, why don’t we have story-time?”
Everyone else was following Derek’s example, standing still, watching the demon, waiting.
Taking silence as permission, it began to speak again. “I assume you know, because you’re a super-special werewolf or whatever, but man, this kid has it bad for you. I can kinda see it, going after the leather-jacket-wearing dangerous type, but really, it’s almost masochistic. You hate him, but he wants to fuck you. He’s a therapist’s wet-dream. Getting over Lydia just to fall for you.”
Derek’s face didn’t so much as twitch, and he kept his eyes cold, hard, distant, but he knew the pack could tell he was upset—his heart was racing. My kingdom for some duct-tape, he thought wildly, trying not to think of the implications of what he was hearing—that Stiles had a crush on him.
“Speaking of wet-dreams—”
“Shut up!” Alison screamed, fists clenching around her useless crossbow. “Sh-shut up or I’ll shoot you!”
“Be my guest. Nothing can hurt me, sweetheart, but a whole lot can hurt your friend. Now where was I—oh yeah, this loser’s crush on the alpha werewolf. He thinks he loves you, but he’s just a kid. He’s not even legal yet.” It began to laugh cruelly, sounding so unlike Stiles that Derek couldn’t stop goosebumps from rising on his arms. “Wow, so this isn’t how he wanted you to find out—you should hear him screaming inside his head. Begging me not to tell you about the things he dreams of doing to you, what he dreams you’ll do to him—”
A rock bounced off Stiles’s head; Derek turned to see that Lydia had thrown it. “Dear god, you demons talk more than I do. Instead of making up stories about Stiles, why don’t you make peace with Satan or whoever you answer to, because soon the Winchesters will be here.” She said all that with a sharp, quick air of superiority and arrogance that seemed enough to shut the demon up, at least temporarily.
“And what happens when I tell them what you freaks are?” it said after a long moment.
“Because demons are known for their trustworthiness? I don’t think you’ll get much talking done anyway, they have quite a reputation.” She crossed her arms and flipped her red hair behind her shoulders with a regal toss of her head.
Derek heard the unmistakable sound of a classic car approaching—the low rumble of the engine had to belong to the hunters’ Impala. The rest of the pack heard it too; they turned with hopeful faces to watch for the approaching vehicle.
“The ginger bitch talks a big talk, but we’ll see what they think of you werewolves.”
No one bothered to respond or even acknowledge that it had spoken. Half a minute later, the car came into view. Derek told himself that he wasn’t nervous, terrified even, but his body was betraying him. His instincts were telling him to run, but that wasn’t an option. Whatever it took to save Stiles.
The Impala stopped and Scott got out of the back, his expression so openly hopeful that Derek almost believed this situation could end well for everyone but the demon. The alpha’s pessimistic nature took over again, though, and when his beta was next to him, he hissed, “We can’t trust them.”
“Yes, we can. We have to.” Scott wasn’t looking at Stiles so poignantly that he might as well have been staring openly at the possessed teen. “I won’t lose my best friend.”
“When this goes south, you get them out of here. Ah,” he cut Scott off before he could start arguing, “That’s an order.”
While they’d been speaking, the Winchesters had been gathering things from their trunk. The younger brother spoke. “Been a while since we’ve done an exorcism. Brings me back.”
“Well, does being surrounded by werewolves bring you—” The demon was dramatically cut off as the older Winchester splashed liquid on Stiles’s face. It began to scream, doubling over in pain. Derek felt a hand on his arm before he realized he’d moved. Scott was holding him back
“What the hell are you doing?!” the alpha shouted, trying to get out of Scott’s grasp.
“Relax, it’s just holy water. It only hurts the demon.”
Derek believed the hunter, but he didn’t care for the nonchalant way he was treating the situation. They both seemed jaded and a little callous. “Okay, just—please. Get it over with.”
“Yeah.” Sam opened up a book and began to read what sounded like Latin. Several yards away, Lydia was quietly translating to Alison, probably doing it more to calm her nerves than to be informative.
The demon was taking it just about as well as it took the holy water. Though he knew that it wasn’t really Stiles suffering, Derek still found it hard to watch.
A fluttering sound that made Derek think of cold days at the park interrupted the exorcism. The demon was kneeling on the ground panting, with such a murderous expression on its face that Derek was glad it was trapped in a circle. When he turned from that sight, though, he nearly forgot all about it.
The man who looked like a mental patient was standing in front of Sam, pushing the book closed slowly.
“Cas—what are you doing?” Dean demanded.
“He’s helping me.” Derek turned to see a woman—the same one who’d been there the previous night. “You see, the demon is working for me, so I don’t want you to exorcise him just yet.”
“That’s not your call, lady,” Derek informed her, his voice quiet, restrained. “That demon is possessing my friend, so it’s leaving his body tonight.”
“Sorry, handsome, but this isn’t your call. Run on home and you might see your friend again one day. But this is way outta your small-town scope of things.”
“Since when do you take orders from Meg, Cas?” Dean looked as angry as Derek felt; whoever or whatever this Cas guy was, he must have meant a lot to the hunter for his betrayal to hurt that badly.
“Meg is my friend, I’m helping her—”
“Helping her what? Hoard souls using crossroads demons? Do you realize what’s going to happen to this town in ten years?”
“They made their deals fairly. Their sacrifice is necessary to stop Crowley.”
Beside him, Scott suddenly stepped forward, shouting, “I don’t care! I don’t care about this Meg woman or whoever the fuck Crowley is or what happens in ten years—all I care about is that my best friend is gone and I want him back! You people are supposed to help with stuff like this!”
Silence filled the space between them; the hunters actually looked a little abashed, but Meg and Cas wore poker faces. Eventually Dean spoke up. “Cas, come on, don’t help her. You can’t trust a demon.”
“She’s proven herself—”
“No, she hasn’t. She tired to kill us, tried to help Lucifer get out of the cage. Then she tried to suck up to us so we’d keep her alive—she’s one of those fish that attach themselves to sharks—”
“Remora,” Lydia corrected, “they’re called remoras.”
“Uh, yeah.” Dean suddenly seemed to remember that their little tiff had an audience mostly comprised of strangers. “Cas, she’s just trying to use you to get her own way.”
“And you’ve never used me?” The man’s face wasn’t so blank after all; Derek saw pain in his eyes.
“No, Cas, because I—because we’re friends. Or did you forget that? Since when do you see people as expendable objects. What happened to loving God’s creation?”
Uncertainty flashed through Cas’s eyes, but then Meg took his hand and said, “If we don’t stop Crowley, all these people will be in danger. He’s planning an apocalypse of his own.”
“Yeah? And what are you planning?” Sam asked sharply. “A coup?”
“In so many words, yes. Cas here is helping me, and you should be, too.”
“Help you set up rogue crossroads demons to collect human souls to gain power? Lady, you’re bat-shit insane if you think we’re on board for that.” Dean pulled a knife from his coat. “I suggest you leave and stop trying to con Cas into helping you set yourself up as the new king of hell.”
“See, Cas, I told you. They pretend to care so much about freewill but won’t let you make your own choices.”
“Freewill and plain stupidity are different things, Meg. You’re trying to manipulate him.” Sam sounded a great deal calmer than his brother.
“No,” Cas said, “She told me about Crowley and I offered to help. We can trust her, and we need to work together. Please.” His plea was clearly directed more towards Dean than Sam, and for a long moment Derek felt uncomfortable, as if he was spying on a private moment.
Cas and Dean seemed to have forgotten everyone else; they simply held each other’s gaze.
“Alright,” Dean conceded, “But we’re not doing it her way. We do it our way, and we get rid of that demon. We promised these kids we’d help their friend.”
Meg sighed. “Is that non-negotiable?”
“Hey—what are you doing?!” the demon screamed, stepping to the edge of the circle.
“Yes.” Sam and Dean spoke in unison, and the woman shrugged.
“Okay, I’ll have him pick a new body.”
Stiles’s form relaxed. “Yeah, fine, I mean I’ll miss this one, such an interesting soul in it. But leaving is better than going back to hell.”
Meg moved to break the circle, but Dean stopped her with his next words. “And you’re undoing the contracts he made. All of them.”
“No way, I need their power. I can’t dethrone Crowley with one angel and a handful of crossroads demons. We have to have the souls.”
“Wow, gee Meg, I have a great idea—you should crack open Purgatory and—oh wait! That’s right, these sorts of plans always go awry. We stopped one apocalypse on our own terms. We can stop another.”
“She’s lying,” Derek interrupted, growing tired of waiting for these people to stop talking about insane shit like the end of the world and do what he really wanted them to—save Stiles. “I can tell she’s lying to you.”
“How?” The hunters were giving him their full attention.
“Because he’s a werewolf! Did I not mention that earlier?” The demon’s smug smile made Derek want to do violent things, but he couldn’t direct his rage at Stiles’s body.
Scott began to laugh. “Werewolf? That’s the best thing you can come up with? Hey, newsflash, it’s the full moon tonight. I don’t see anyone howling and turning into a wolf.”
That was the truth; Derek had long since trained his pack to be able to resist the call of the full moon. He’d completely forgotten what day of the month it was he’d been so worried about Stiles.
“Cas, is the demon telling the truth?” Dean whispered.
Then man’s eyes met Derek’s. “No,” his heartbeat increased—he was lying for them. The alpha wondered how Cas knew about the werewolves; he was obviously not entirely human, but he wasn’t a demon either. “These people are human.”
“I can just tell when people lie,” Derek insisted, “And you can’t trust her. Just exorcise her—that’s what you do, right? You’re demon hunters.”
“Honey, this is more complicated than you can understand,” Meg said, raking her eyes up and down Derek’s body. He shuddered as if her gaze were a touch, thinking of Kate and feeling unclean, naked. “And I’m not lying.”
She was, but he didn’t know her angle. Too much of what had passed between the hunters and the demon had been beyond his comprehension, but he knew her intentions weren’t what she was pretending. “You are—and I don’t care what your little game is, but you aren’t involving my—” he faltered for half a second because he’d been about to say my Stiles and he didn’t know why the fuck those words wanted to come out of his mouth, “—my friend.”
“I won’t. We’ll give your little human back.” She turned to the Winchesters. “But I’m not giving the souls back.”
Sam and Dean met each other’s eye, words passing silently between them. After a while of this, they both nodded. “Okay, but you call off your crossroads demons and we do this our way.”
“Deal.”
“Wait—what?” the demon in the trap asked, a little frantic, “Just like that, I’m demoted back to a normal demon?! That wasn’t part of our deal!”
“Adaptability is the key to survival,” Meg said flippantly, turning away from him. If she’d been paying more attention she would have noticed the flash of rage that stole over Stile’s young face. In that instant Derek knew that the demon was turning on Meg. She kinda deserved it; even though he hadn’t known her more than five minutes he already knew the type of person she was—a manipulative bitch.
As much as he wanted to see her unknown plans ruined out of spite, Derek realized that if the demon who had Stiles rebelled, it could very well take its human host away with it.
Before he could begin to think of a plan to stop the demon from leaving, Meg was already kicking the devil’s trap open. Adrenaline flooded his body and time seemed to slow; Derek was sure, so sure, that Stiles would disappear to a distant corner of the world and never be seen again.
In the space of a breath he saw the future without Stiles in it—he saw Scott missing his best friend, the pack missing a valuable honorary member, Sheriff Stilinski completely alone—but beyond that he saw a gaping hole in his own life.
Derek was not so melodramatic as to make grand statements like he couldn’t live without someone. He’d lost enough to know that life moved on, he could move on, but losing Stiles would be almost unbearable for a long time. The alpha realized, as he faced that prospect, Stiles meant more to him than he had been willing to admit to himself.
But the demon didn’t vanish into the night; he walked calmly out of the circle, thanking Meg for releasing him.
Feeling his body relax, Derek sighed. Maybe the demon wasn’t going to betray anyone yet.
“Alright, get a move on, leave the body.” Dean’s voice was still almost light-hearted.
“And find a host that doesn’t have a soul,” Sam added.
“Fine, I’m going,” the demon waved Stiles’s hand flippantly, but Derek heard his heart rate increase. By their reactions, so did the rest of his pack, but even their fast reactions weren’t quick enough.
Instead of vacating the body, the demon suddenly appeared right next to Dean, hitting him hard enough to send the man flying several yards back. His brother moved to stop it, but the demon had the knife that the hunter had been holding, and he drove the man back with a quick slash of the blade.
Cas was suddenly by Dean’s side, checking his vitals from what Derek could see, though he only spared them a short glance. His attention was almost entirely given over to Stiles’s body and the monster controlling it. His pack also moved in on the demon, eyes flashing but otherwise keeping their humanity despite the pull of the moon.
They were too slow, which Derek could forgive them for—but what he couldn’t forgive was that he was too slow, that even with all his prowess and skill as an alpha he wasn’t nearly fast enough to stop what happened. For years he would wake up in the night gasping, having failed again in dreams, always just a little less than what he needed to be.
He watched a living nightmare unfold in front of him. The demon whirled to face Meg, who was only a foot from him. He aimed a stab at her torso but she dodged, avoiding even the tip of the knife though it threw off her balance a little. With a deftness that revealed her as far more experienced in combat than the other demon, she used the momentum of her dodge to pull Stiles’s body off balance with her, and they both tumbled to the ground.
All this happened before the werewolves could close the gap of several dozen yards between them and the demons. Meg swiftly wrestled the knife from Stiles’s hands and wasted no time raising it to aim a stab at him. Her eyes were solid black, her mouth turned up in an expression of determination that had more than a dash of pleasure in it. The knife came down and the blade disappeared in Stiles’s chest.
Orange light crackled from the teen’s eyes, mouth, ears, and then his body went limp. By that time Derek was kneeling beside him; Meg was gone, a fact he barely registered.
There wasn’t any blood on Stiles’s shirt, not a drop. Derek knew what that meant, what the vacancy in his warm golden eyes meant. Numbly he pulled Stiles into his lap, feeling for a pulse that was stilled forever. He parted his lips to inform Scott—now kneeling beside him—of the news, but all that came out was, “No no no no no,” a rapid exhalation filled with too many words to be comprehensible.
He was shaking Stiles’s shoulders as if he were just asleep and not dead; the knife was still in his chest but Derek didn’t want to take it out because of an irrational fear that the man in his arms would bleed to death if the wound was opened, never mind the fact that the blade had killed him instantly, stabbed him through the heart. There would be no bleeding.
Stiles wasn’t Stiles anymore; he was just a body, and empty shell. Derek blinked and felt tears gather in his eyes—tears of sorrow and rage. He could feel his hands become claws, his teeth change to fangs. Above him the impartial moon continued its constant whisper of Come and play come and play and he was finding it harder to ignore. The prospect of running wild through the woods killing everything that moved was more and more tempting by the second as he stared into the lifeless eyes of the corpse that had once been Stiles Stilinski.
Scott’s hand on his shoulder brought him back to reality. “Derek—don’t—not now—the hunters—” his voice was raspy and broken, but somehow he managed to keep it together enough to prevent Derek from making a monumental mistake. With difficulty he used the searing pain of loss to anchor himself to humanity; he made himself feel it despite the numbness that wanted to take over.
“Give me the knife, Derek,” Boyd said gently, making the alpha tear his eyes away from Stiles’s to look at him.
“Why?”
“We’re going to get that demon bitch,” Erica hissed, “And that knife is special. You saw what it did.”
Scott moved a trembling hand to take the knife, but Derek stopped him. “No, I’ll do it.” The blade was serrated so it didn’t come out easily; he had to work it, trying not to listen to the wet sound of flesh parting before the knife.
After an eternity it was out and Derek handed it to Boyd without comment. He would let them run through the woods chasing a demon if they wanted. They wouldn’t catch her—she could be anywhere—but they needed to try. He understood.
A few minutes later the rest of the werewolves other than Scott were gone. The beta was still sitting quietly by Stiles’s body, Alison in his arms, Lydia beside him; all of them were just trying to come to grips with what had happened.
“How are we going to tell the sheriff?” Lydia asked through tears. “What are we going to tell him?”
She was speaking to Derek because he was the alpha, the one with the answers and the orders. But he didn’t know. He was having trouble caring. “Tell him the truth if you want. Tell him a lie. Doesn’t matter now.”
“Where did the hunters go?” Scott was glancing around, not even bothering to wipe the tears from his face; more would replace them either way.
Derek didn’t bother looking up. Where the hunters were didn’t matter to him. He could feel himself slipping away, sinking beneath the trauma and the pain and becoming numb at last. A current of anger was all that was keeping him sane.
He would see Meg dead if it took him a lifetime, but for the moment he could only gaze into Stiles’s clouding eyes.
When the demon hit him in the chest it knocked the wind out of him, something Dean was almost used to by this point in his violent life. But one never really got used to the feeling, so as the world was shattering around Derek Hale, he was lying on his back in the dirt, gasping for breath and thinking that maybe he was getting a little old for hunting.
Cas was beside him after a moment, restoring his breath with a light touch and taking away the pain in his ribs. A few of them had probably been broken.
“Thanks,” he managed, sitting up.
A scream interrupted his thoughts; several dozen yards away Meg was straddling the crossroads demon, then Dean saw her disappear. With a sinking feeling he recognized the signs that meant the kid was as dead as the demon who’d possessed him. He didn’t have to see the teen’s friends gather around his body to be sure of it.
“Shitfuck,” he spat, “We need to find Meg. Got any idea where she is?”
Sam ran up to them as Cas answered, “No, but I can find her.” Without asking he took the brothers with him as he disappeared.
They landed in the middle of the woods. From the types of trees and amount of underbrush they weren’t too far from the crossroads, but it was much darker. The sky lacked the faint orange glow that meant they were near the town. Only the full moon provided light for them, but Dean trusted Cas to warn them if anything unsavory was approaching.
“If you’re going to chastise me for killing that little punk, don’t bother. It was self-defense.” Meg was leaning against a tree not far from them. “Sorry that I had to kill the kid to do it.”
“You don’t seem too sorry.” Dean thought of Scott McCall, his honest youthfulness, they way he’d said him and the dead kid were practically brothers, best friends for life. He remembered the fear in the teen’s voice as he asked for help in saving him.
Dean knew what it was to lose a brother—hell, he’d lost just about everyone in his life. It never got any easier, but Scott probably hadn’t buried anyone before except maybe grandparents. The first death was like first love; it had a way of haunting you.
“Sacrifices have to be made. Now, let’s talk business.”
“Yeah, like about why Crowley would want to end the world. What’s in it for him?” Sam’s arms were crossed in a very serious manner; to other people he probably looked imposing and intimidating, but to Dean he just looked comical.
“I won’t pretend to fathom what he really wants. All I know is what I’ve learned from his little minions. If you want more answers, we’ll have to ask him ourselves.”
Dean turned to watch Cas; the angel seemed conflicted, as if he were questioning his decision to help Meg.
“How’s he even going to bring about the apocalypse?”
“He’s going to try to break open the cage—”
“Bullshit. He can’t. Not without another Lilith, and last I checked we’re fresh out.” Sammy sure was sassy this evening, Dean thought wryly. His brother was right.
“If Cas got Sam out, don’t you think another angel strong enough could free Lucifer?”
“But why?” Dean countered, “Crowley helped bring him down. He’s right where he wants to be, king of hell, has a truce with us. If it ain’t broke he won’t fix it.”
“Do you have solid proof, Meg?” Cas asked her. The night was too dark for Dean to see the demon’s reaction, but he could hear the change in her voice—grasping for straws.
“No, but if we capture one of his people we can—Don’t you trust me? What about earlier today?”
The tone of her voice made Dean’s figurative hackles rise. He didn’t like the implication of something sexual having gone on between them. Something that couldn’t possibly have been jealousy made him resolve not to help Meg in her little plot to overthrow Crowley. He didn’t trust her, even after all these years of her helping them. She’d only been doing it to save herself, and now she was trying to con them into something. He was sure of it. She was toying with Cas to do it, and that crossed the line so far that it was just a dot in the distance.
No one manipulated his angel. “We’re through here, Meg. I don’t want to see you again.” His voice was hard, and the demon seemed to understand the danger she was in.
But before she could answer, a howl sounded from the nearby woods, and then another, closer to them.
“The werewolves are angry I imagine,” Cas commented, “You killed one of their own.”
Before Dean had a chance to ask the angel what he was talking about, the three of them were back at the crossroads, standing by the Impala. The howls were almost too far away to hear.
The kids were still kneeling around the body of the one Meg had killed; Dean could hardly look at them. None of them seemed to notice their arrival.
“This sucks,” Sam whispered. “We promised we’d help him.”
“Can’t win ‘em all. Cas, what did you mean about the were—” He turned to speak to the angel but found him gone.
Derek heard the sound that meant the weird mental-patient guy was back again, bur he failed to care about that fact. Stiles was still dead, and the hunters were whispering about it with little empathy. Just another day at the office for them.
Exhaustion and apathy were all he had left, so he didn’t even flinch when Cas touched his shoulder, though he did resist being pulled away from the corpse he was still holding. Stiles had only been dead a few minutes, and even though it seemed like so much longer than that to the alpha, he wasn’t ready to let go.
“I’m sorry this happened, Derek,” the man murmured sincerely. “I can help if you let me.”
His laugh was eerie and hollow. “You got a bottle of whiskey on you?”
“I don’t.” Cas leaned over Derek and lightly touched Stiles’s forehead. “But I am an angel of the Lord and can call back souls from heaven.”
Fucking nutjob, the alpha thought, then jumped with the body in his arms moved, took a gasping breath, struggled to escape his admittedly overly tight grip.
Lydia and Alison screamed and Scott exclaimed some pretty interesting curses. Stiles himself seemed confused about what was happening; his heart was aflutter and he was having trouble forming a sentence.
“Derek—I—why’m I—what’s going on—Alison you’ve got mascara all over—have you guys been crying?—what happened?—who’s dead?” Stiles managed to say all that in record time as Derek let him sit up.
Everyone was silent; Cas had left again if the fluttering sound was any indication, but Derek couldn’t look away from Stiles. He touched the teen’s face, his short hair, his shoulders, eyes wide with wonder, mouth agape.
“You’re alive,” he breathed.
“Duh, why wouldn’t I be?”
Touching the hole in Stiles’s shirt, which was only lightly stained with blood, Derek felt the soft skin underneath, marveling at its wholeness. The other looked down at it, too, then began to panic.
“What the hell happened to me?! I remember that demon woman coming after me and then—then I was here.”
Derek was having trouble deciding if this was real or if he’d gone off the deep end and was hallucinating. Stiles’s skin felt real, his voice sounded real, the way his lips moved and the way his face betrayed his thoughts seemed real. The way he was fidgeting also seemed real.
“Did I die?!” he asked incredulously, then paused, cheeks reddening. “Oh god, the things the demon said—he was lying. I mean seriously, like I have a crush on you I mean no way—”
“Stiles,” Derek interrupted, “I can tell when you’re lying.”
He became an even brighter shade of pink. “Oh well you know,” he said offhand, moving to get away from the alpha, “I’ll just go find a cliff to jump off of because this isn’t happening.”
“No.” Placing his hand gently on the side of Stiles’s face, he turned his head to meet his eye. “It’s okay.”
Derek didn’t care that he was surrounded by people; his face was close enough to Stiles’s that it was all he could focus on. Their lips were only half a foot apart and the alpha wanted to remove the distance, but that felt too much like taking advantage. Stiles had just been through an unimaginable trauma—
Cutting off his line of thought, Stiles suddenly leaned forward and kissed Derek. There was a surprising amount of passion in it, and an edge of caution that disappeared quickly, as if the teen had decided that if he was going to do a thing, he’d do it right.
“Finally,” Scott muttered, and that was all that Derek bothered to pay attention to.
They were two states over from California when Dean finally asked Cas the question that had been on his mind the most since the incident with Meg. There’d been a lot of questions, none of them spoken aloud, not by him or Sammy, but one in particular danced on his tongue and tried to escape every time he opened his mouth to talk to the angel.
After driving all day they stopped for the night in between tiny towns. Because the brothers were running low on cash and the weather was mild they decided to sleep under the stars in a lonely field. Sam was stretched out on blankets, sound asleep, but Dean felt restless.
Cas hadn’t left them. That should have been a good thing—but it made the older Winchester feel like he was just waiting for something bad to happen, for the angel to disappear again, maybe forever this time.
Sitting on the hood of the Impala, watching the stars move slowly across the sky, Dean worried and fretted and fought with himself. Cas was there beside him, equally silent, thinking his own unknowable thoughts.
“So I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Dean began in a whisper so as to avoid waking his brother, “Back in Beacon Hills, with the kid, you brought him back to life. Why’d you do it?” Since his brush with insanity, Cas had often been detached from the parts of humanity that didn’t directly involve the Winchesters. He didn’t usually go out of his way to play God. Dean almost winced at that phrasing, and almost smiled.
Cas looked shocked by his friend’s ignorance. “If I’d just walked away, everything we do would have been meaningless. You know, saving people, hunting things. The family business.”
Dean knew he probably looked like an idiot with his mouth open and his eyes as wide as they could go but he was powerless to stop it. Cas’s words hadn’t been idle; with them he meant to tell Dean that he was part of the family, he was with them forever, or at least until the brothers’ untimely deaths.
I am so in love with him, Dean thought, not even trying to lie to himself about it anymore. He stood up and turned to face Cas, standing between the angel’s knees.
He wanted to say something that portrayed even a little of what he was feeling, but he couldn’t, and by Cas’s expression, his silence was worrying.
So he did the only thing he could think of; he pulled the angel into a kiss. It was gentle, tentative, because Dean didn’t want to force himself on anyone, especially not the particular someone in front of him.
When Cas returned the kiss Dean’s fear melted away, and then things began to head in a direction that definitely wasn’t PG. He felt the slight shift that meant the angel had transported them somewhere else, and after a long moment he pulled away from Cas and glanced around. It was still dark but they were in an entirely different field than the one were Sam and the Impala were.
“Why—?” Dean began, but Cas cut him off.
“I didn’t want to disturb Sam.”
For half a second he wondered how kissing would disturb anyone, then he gathered Cas’s meaning—and feeling the angel’s erection pressing against his leg didn’t hurt that thought process. “Oh,” he breathed, then stopped talking altogether.
Sam woke up in the middle of the night, propelled from sleep by a nightmare he couldn’t really remember. He wasn’t surprised or disturbed to find himself alone with the Impala. In fact, he smiled to himself and whispered, “Finally,” before rolling over and readjusting his blankets.