To Dance With Wolves ▪Liam Dunbar▪

✓ | 08. Now They Know

I could barely move in my condition, but that didn't mean I was just going to let her cut my head off without putting up a fight. I kicked a nearby case of lacrosse gear into her, making her stumble and singe herself with her own weapon. She was only down for a moment though, and as soon as she picked herself up she ran right at me, lashing out with her red hot wire. I cried out in pain as she managed to rake her burning wire across my wrists when I threw them up to protect my face. I kicked out at her ankles, knocking her off balance in retaliation, but my attempts proved to be futile when she was ripped away of me and thrown back into the wall but someone much stronger and in control than myself. 

I stared in shock at her limp body and closed eyes for a handful of seconds that felt like hours before I was able to tear myself away from the scene in front of me and look up to see who had thrown her halfway across the room and knocked her unconscious. When I finally did, I was met with a pair of burning red eyes. 

Bursting into tears yet again at the sight before my eyes, and the weight of everything that had happened in the last sixty seconds, I scrambled back until my trembling skin hit the wall. Once I realized there was no way out though, all the fight drained from my still shaking body in an instant, and all I could do was bury my head in my knees, squeeze my eyes shut, and wait for the inevitable terrible act that would surely follow.

But it didn't.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Scott said gently, placing a light and hesitant hand on my shoulder. I picked my head up and through tear filled eyes saw him turn to the person who had just run through the door. I was still gasping for breath when he paused before crouching in front of me next to Scott.

"Scott . . . I think she's having a panic attack. She needs to calm down, we need to calm her down."

"Okay Stiles, how do we do that? Someone just tried to kill her!" Scott shot back urgently.

"I don't know!" 

I winced as Stiles shouted, but he didn't seem to notice. "But we need to get her the hell out of here before anyone sees this." He said, waving his arms over Brett's and Violet's unconscious bodies. 

Scott nodded wordlessly and the next thing I knew, I was being lifted into the air and carried away. "I'll take her to an empty classroom, but you have to get Liam and call your dad."

I was barely lucid for any of the trip from the locker room to the biology classroom, but the second Scott set me down in a chair at one of the far lab tables, I became hyper-aware of every heavy, strained breath I took. Scott stayed silent, watching me curiously, and maybe even worriedly, from his position near the door as I tried to get myself under control. After a minute, I couldn't bare the feeling of his eyes burning holes in the side of my cheek, and I pulled my legs up to my chest and buried my head in my knees.

By the time I heard the door open I had stopped shaking and crying, because I had finally managed to come to terms with the knowledge that despite the fact that Scott was clearly, and self admittedly, a werewolf, he wasn't actually an animal. He'd been nothing but surprisingly gentle every time I'd encountered him, and especially in the last few minutes. There were any number of ways he might react to me finding out what was presumably his most guarded secret, but killing, hell, even just hurting me, wasn't one of them.

"What happened, Scott?" Liam's voice asked from the doorway.

"I found her and Brett in the locker room, Violet was trying to kill them. She was freaking out so I brought her here to calm down and to keep her safe. She's not talking, which is understandable, but it's safe to say that if she didn't know about us before, she definitely does now."

"Oh, don't worry, she knew." Liam said definitively, tossing my sketchbook to Scott, all the loose papers fluttering free and falling to the ground, revealing that Liam was right. I didn't even bother wondering how he got them, because it didn't really matter anymore. 

"Wait," Scott said after a moment, the sound of shuffling papers filling the air before he continued. "How do you know all of this? There's no way you had time to search all this up, make all these sketches, and write all this down in the two hours in between school and the game. And how do you know about Chris? Or about betas, or about the eyes, or any of this?"

"I didn't just see you this afternoon." I said, finally looking up and meeting Scott's confused brown eyes. 

Realization dawned on his face and he let my sketchbook fall from his hands. "You were in the woods the night of the party. Weren't you?"

I nodded wordlessly, glancing to the ground where a few of my sketches were still lying.

"Why were you out in the middle of the woods that late at night?" Liam asked after a moment of uncomfortable silence.

"Does it matter?" I asked softly without looking up.

Liam shrugged and the room fell back into a deadly still quiet.

"So . . . what's going to happen now?" I asked when I couldn't stand the silence any longer

Liam looked to Scott, but Scott was still staring blankly at the loose papers scattered across the table in front of him. 

"I won't tell anyone if you're worried about that, I'm a pro at keeping secrets. What's one in my head more gonna do?" I said, speaking up again when no one else made a move to. I was more than eager to escape the school and get home so I could slather copious amounts of burn ointment on my wrists where Violet's wire had branded them, but I wasn't about to try to leave without first sorting out whatever was happening.

 Scott ran his hands through his hair with a distressed look on his face. "Okay, that's good, that's good. I . . . I have to go find Kira and talk to the Sheriff. You can go home, both of you. I'll figure this all out tomorrow."

With that, he gave us and the room a quick once-over and then walked out the door, leaving me alone with Liam.

That's when things got interesting.