Beacon ⌲ Stiles Stilinski [1] EDITING

fourteen

I felt dizzy.

I had already seen the monster in the school last week and the one controlling my nightmares, but I guess there had always been a sliver of denial brewing in the back of my mind, or rather a question.

How could anything like that actually exist?

Maybe the fact that I had never really stopped to look at the monster when it burst through the ceiling tiles made it easier for me to blame my hallucinations; that I had just had another episode in the panic of the moment.

But the man strapped to the wall beneath the Hale house was real. It had the same teeth, the same glowing eyes, the same horrifying scowl. It was all real. And it was all Derek.

Werewolves were supposed to be something in fairytales or legends, like the history archives Allison discovered for our family heritage project. They weren't something you were supposed to have chasing you down the hallway of your high school, or hanging like a prize and being stroked by your thought-to-be-normal aunt.

That was a whole other thing. The light in Kate's eyes when she tortured Derek, and the cackles in her voice when she prodded at his jaw absolutely shook me. That was her job, that was Dad's job. All of these secrets had been kept under our noses this entire time and I was beginning to wonder if anything our Dad had told us about why he always left for work so sporadically was the truth. He probably was just leaving to help Aunt Kate torture someone; someone who could shape-shift into an animal because that was the family business.

And now we were expected to jump in.

I knew I had said I wanted answers and I wanted to feel like I knew what was going on, and I was relieved that I finally got some information. But, each answer seemed to open up to a thousand more avenues of confusion.

Allison had wanted to feel strong, and so did I, but I was no longer sure if I could live up to the task. Especially if Kate's idea of being strong was to go out and hunt an unassuming teenager and torture him for enjoyment.

I wasn't sure if Allison felt the same way as me. Glancing over to her in the driver's seat, it looked like she was about to explode, her face shifting as she pressed her lips together tightly.

She had insisted that she was okay to drive when we left, but I was beginning to doubt her.

"That's what was down the hall," Allison spoke finally. "The thing Jackson said he saw. The one you saw. A shape shifter."

"A werewolf," I nodded, my words coming out in barely a whisper.

"I don't understand. I do not understand. H-how is this real?" her voice was breaking now and she slammed her hand on the steering wheel.

I didn't respond because I didn't have an answer for her, staring out the windshield at the pouring rain.

"Can you believe they weren't going to tell us? How could they not tell us?"

I looked at her sadly. "Like Kate said, they thought we wouldn't be able to handle it-"

There was silence for a moment as we both recalled our Aunt's words. Mom and Dad expected us to be frightened and to cry. They expected us to act like how we were quite accurately reacting, and I found it hard to be mad at them for it.

"-I guess they were right. Maybe we couldn't handle it."

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek but Allison's eyebrows furrowed together, her voice coming out sharper than before. "No."

"No?"

"They don't have to be right," she explained, shaking her head as if she was snapping herself into things. "We are able to handle it."