Shredding the Veil

When Lydia woke up, when she was able to think again, when the tubes and monitors had all been removed from her, she started to plan. Oh with her mother and father, she just smiled and bore their usual arguments, the standard "This is your fault and that's why I divorced you" jabs. They couldn't possibly understand. She'd already had a day of near-catatonia over a "mountain lion" that she knew now was anything but that. Lydia didn't want their attention on her. Luckily for her once her dad insulted her mom's ability to keep her safe and mom got in a dig about a missed alimony payment, they almost forgot she was there.

Good.

She sat there, nodding in the right places, filtering out her parents' arguing, thinking over what had happened.

Something had attacked her.

Something.

Not a man. It had looked like a man, but it hadn't been one. Men didn't open their jaws impossibly wide and chomp into you. Men didn't grow fur and claws and leave your stomach torn wide, held only together by over sixty stitches. Men didn't have eyes that glowed red at night and they didn't howl at the moon.

She was Lydia Martin, damn it. She was rational, could do a double variable equation in under a minute or synthesize a Molotov Cocktail without breaking a sweat. One day she'd be at Harvard or MIT, working her way into history for a theorem only she could understand. 

Lydia didn't sit in a room, spacing out and thinking about the werewolf---yes, the goddamnwerewolf---who had savaged her, didn't let her hand trail over the wound that was healing so slowly, didn't imagine herself in a month on all fours, slobbering at the moon.

That wasn't her.

Except it was today, wasn't it?

Today she was trying to figure out frantically when the next full moon would be, how to factor in the eight days she'd been unconscious. Today she was trying to remember how many pieces of silver jewelry she owned and what the fuck she was going to do with them now. Today she was nodding in the right places (she hoped) and snuggling down after bad Jell-O and her tired parents' throats gone hoarse with shouts. Today, she was wondering if that freak would come back for her.

If she'd want him to.

As she curled in on herself, trying desperately to get herself to fall asleep and dream of anything but of sprouting fur and twisting bone, something else flitted through her mind, something fuzzy from maybe the day after the dance. She'd woken up just a little, roused a tiny bit when a door had slammed shut in her room.

Two voices, familiar.

Stiles and Scott, Frick and Frack .

Stiles, concern in his voice, something real, something she didn't hear in her father's even now, Stiles asking the question that was tearing through her mind as she struggled to recover:

What the Hell is she? 

Nine days. Nine day since she was bitten.

In another nineteen she'd know, know if she were even human anymore, but before then?

It was time to figure out just what the Hell Stiles knew about it.

About her