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Derek takes my virginity, after that Derek’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Derek and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Derek Hale.
The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Derek says, “You really won’t die.”
With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun. I read about the science of it, once, after Derek told me. The holes let out all of the compressed gas as the gunpowder ignites. It’ll decrease the force driving the bullet, slowing it down, but the miniature explosion that takes place in the chamber won’t be nearly as loud. Won’t alert as many people, catch their attention so they see what’s happening before their eyes.
Still more than enough speed to drive the bullet into my brain and out the back of my skull.
“This isn’t really death,” Derek says. “You’ll be a hero. You can run with the wolves.”
I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Derek, I don’t want this.
The wolves are in the warehouse below us where they wait for their alpha to take care of the loose ends, whether that means tying them up or cutting them away.
I’m the loose end.
The warehouse is located in one of those rough corners of the city that the upper-class like to forget about and the politicians neglect to fund. Buildings rot, the police conveniently forget to patrol the streets and the detritus of the city gathers in the corners, growing like mold or plaque in the unbrushed creases of your molars. This particular warehouse used to be a toothpaste factory. Derek told me that when we chose the location. He said he could still smell traces of mint and chemicals. It was some off-brand, a knock-off of a knock-off of a major company, maybe Colgate or Crest. They never took off, so they went bankrupt and left the hollowed out building behind along with the machinery that was too expensive to have removed.
The wolves are getting restless. The moon hangs high and full above us, its muted glow washed out and thinned down by the streetlamps below us. I can hear cars rolling down the street and police sirens farther away. I feel small, insignificant.
If a college dropout gets shot through the head and the only people around don’t give a shit, does it make a sound?
That’s not how the quote goes, but it doesn’t matter. Not much really matters when you’re staring death in the face. Or rather, tasting the steel of it on your tongue as it forces your teeth apart like the Jaws of Life prying open a car wreck; an ironic juxtaposition, given the circumstances.
That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways.
Derek’s other hand, the one not holding the gun, is fisted in my hair and I can picture my scalp white with tension as he pulls the strands taut away from my skin. Death, when forced into your mouth and a finger’s twitch away from you, has a way of putting things into perspective. Two years ago I graduated from high school and watched as the girl of my dreams hung off the arm of the jock that I hated. It doesn’t matter. Sixteen years ago, Erica Reyes was diagnosed with Dravet’s syndrome, an epileptic condition that periodically sends her shaking apart like a portrait on an Etch-a-Sketch. Ten years ago, Claudia Stilinski died and her son was privately, guiltily relieved. Seven years ago, Derek Hale slept with a girl and she burned his family alive. All of these events are nothing but microscopic blips on a timeline of tragedy that mankind’s been weaving since the start of history. For the world, my death, when it comes, will be the same. For me, the whole world will collapse. I wonder how clean the gun is, if it will even matter in five minutes.
Someone lets a dog out into their cramped backyard and I hear it bark distantly. The walls of the warehouse are too thick for me to hear the wolves inside of it, but I know they can hear the dog too. I think about napalm. Napalm, when it burns, can create an atmosphere of over twenty percent carbon monoxide, so if the flames don’t kill you, the poison in your lungs will. You can make napalm yourself by mixing equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate, gasoline and diet cola, or you can dissolve crumbled cat litter in gasoline until it creates a thick paste. I know this because I looked it up online. I looked it up online because Derek asked me.
Derek is gripping my hair tight in one hand and holding a gun in my mouth with the other. The wind whips at our clothes and I think about how it feels to have my hair gripped by Derek in a fit of passion and there is considerably less clothing involved. Scalp stinging as he pulls me in to bruise my lips against his. Pushing my face down into the mattress as he attempts to fill my empty spaces with himself because there’s too much of him to be contained in one body alone. Fingers curling through thick tresses. Normally, remembering these things, I’d be hard by now. But now the wind cuts through my clothes and I’m trying not to chip my teeth on the steel barrel prying them apart.
Two miles away, a Victorian house in the higher end suburbs is coated around the base in a mixture of equal parts gasoline and Minute Maid. After Derek finishes with me, he plans on going over there with his wolves. Says he wants to light the match himself, watch them burn and stand in the middle of it all like a three-dimensional newscast happening in real-time. A family of three lives in that Victorian house: husband, wife, and college student daughter. They’re not the targets, not really. The husband’s sister and father are in the city, visiting, and they’re staying at the house. They’re the real targets. The husband, wife, and daughter are just collateral damage. That’s what Derek tells me.
On the roof of the warehouse with Derek’s gun in my mouth. He adjusts his grip on the gun and it prods at the back of my throat, making me gag and cough, and I suddenly have a flashback to the first time I gave Derek a blowjob. He was sitting on his bed, me between his knees as my own ached where I knelt on the hard floorboards. My hand was wrapped around him and I felt stupid with my lips and chin soaked in my own spit and desperately, desperately trying not to catch him with my teeth. Derek murmured praise to me, ran fingers through my hair as he leaned back and sighed. I took him in as far as I could go and sucked hard once, and his hips jerked. He jabbed at the back of my throat and I choked, and for one horrifying moment, I pictured myself vomiting in his naked lap, and I felt the blood rush to my face in humiliation. My eyes welled with tears and I gasped for breath. I held him still in my mouth and fought down the urge to throw up, and he stroked my tear-streaked cheeks, told me, you’re doing great. Just keep going, you’re doing great. I started moving again.
“Make your choice, Stiles,” Derek says, bringing me back to the roof of the toothpaste factory. “You’re either with me or against me, and I can’t have you standing in my way.”
The wolves are waiting. Erica is probably feigning nonchalance, checking for nonexistent dirt under her red-painted nails as Isaac makes some snide comment or another. Boyd will be standing with her, shoulder to shoulder, in actual nonchalance. In a Victorian house two miles away, with the base painted with homemade napalm, a family is probably getting ready to bed down for the evening, saying goodnight and kissing brows. There’s a gun in my mouth and the moon is full. This is about vengeance. It always has been.
The four of us make a strange, broken shape without a name. Erica wants me. I want Derek. Derek wants Kate Argent. Except Derek doesn’t want Kate in the way I want him. It’s nothing like love, not like it used to be. Derek wants to be the one to burn her world right in front of her eyes.
Just like she burned his.
I start counting down from thirty.
Below us in the warehouse is a pack of wolves I helped Derek handpick. They are our disciples. Derek is their saviour and I am Judas, making the decision between betraying Christ and following him to the end.
Twenty seconds.
I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, you think you’re out of options, Derek, but you’re wrong. I’ve been here from the beginning.
His green eyes burn into mine. I open my mouth.
Count down from five.