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Lydia tells Chris. She knows that Scott would do it, but Scott is still covered in blood and trembling, orbiting around Stiles like sheer radiating love is going to save him. Lydia can’t really look at Stiles right now without feeling the damp breath of the nogitsune against the back of her neck, the way it had smelled faintly of Cheetos and Sharpie. It hadn’t been Stiles, at that point—the nogitune had been wearing a Stiles costume, like Lydia’s mother had broken out flawless Ferragamo skirt suits when she’d taken Lydia’s dad to the cleaners during their divorce proceedings—but Lydia can’t look at Stiles and unsee the nogitsune.
So Lydia tells Chris, “She wanted you to know,” and she presses the silver arrowhead into his palm. It’s the one that had pierced the single defeated oni; it’s covered in a fine layer of black dust, like mountain ash. There’s a fleur de lis imprinted on it that shrieks of Argent family heritage, so between Scott’s distressed babbling and Kira’s explanations, Lydia had cobbled together enough of the story.
Silver arrows. It’s such an—Argent solution.
Chris doesn’t say anything. He curls his fingers around the arrowhead tightly enough to cut into the skin of his palm, the line of his mouth gone thin. Lydia had shrieked at Scott, “Why didn’t you bite her? Why didn’t you bite her?” and Scott had said that it was too late, that it didn’t even hurt anymore. He’d been holding Allison’s head against the inside curve of his shoulder, both of his hands covered in blood to the wrists, his face stricken, barren.
Everything is wrong and terrible. Lydia knows that. It’s cold enough that her tears feel like they’re freezing to her cheeks. It has to be psychosomatic; the freezing point of saline is -23.3°C.
~
Chris wants Allison buried in the Argent necklace, but he asks Lydia to pick her clothes and shoes. His grief looks deeply personal, so far inside that it’s opened up a kind of crack at his core. Lydia thinks he looks dangerously vulnerable, right now, but she can’t seem to do anything with what she sees. Isaac has gone nonverbal. Scott is focusing on Stiles, on keeping Stiles from dying and the nogitsune from killing any more of them. Lydia thinks the sheriff is probably with Kira and her father, but—she could be wrong. She probably isn’t, but she could be.
Lydia finds Allison’s favorite dress, deep blue with a plunging back and wide shoulder straps. There are embroidered flowers across the bottom and up the side; they’d flared out when Allison had turned quickly, to draw her bow or leap at Lydia for a shriek and a hug or frantically review the salient points of game theory before the unit five Econ test. It’s pushed back in Allison’s closet, hanging with the rest of the summer dresses she’d been reluctantly phasing out of regular rotation in favor of sweaters and jeans.
When Lydia goes to lay the dress on Allison’s bed, she experiences a brief moment of confusion; one minute she’s trying to drape it so the skirt won’t wrinkle and the next she’s fisting the comforter, her face buried in Allison’s pillow, and she’s crying hard enough to make even her waterproof mascara run—hard enough to leave little dots of concealer on the pillow, like freckles.
Lydia cries while she finds a pair of tights and Allison’s favorite and most versatile pair of ankle boots and she’s still crying, silently now instead of sobbing, when she leaves through the front door without saying good-bye to Chris. She cries in the elevator, while the people around her look uncomfortable, and she cries on the long walk to her car because street parking downtown is horrific. Lydia had been ashamed of public displays of emotion for years; it was the sort of thing that you were traumatized by when your parents divorced and had public spats at grocery stores and the open lobbies of law offices.
Not that you aren’t—intimidating, Allison had said, pretending to shiver, but sometimes the emotion can be scary, too. You can use that. My mom used to say that.
~
It’s Derek fault, in the end. Lydia stops by the hospital to read Stiles’ chart and she’s outside his room, paging through lines of observations in Melissa McCall’s neat handwriting, when she hears Derek say, “Seriously? Another one?”
“I’m bored,” Stiles says. He doesn’t sound bored. According to Melissa McCall, he’s only sleeping two or three hours a night and is resisting sedation.
Derek says, quelling, “What, you want a bedtime story?”
“Yes,” Stiles hisses, “obviously,” and Lydia holds back a flinch at the sibilants.
“Fine,” Derek snaps back. He waits a few seconds, maybe gathering his thoughts, before he says, in the halting way of someone used to reading stories more than telling them, “There’s a little old lady, in the desert. She’s called la loba. The she-wolf.”
“Shakira, Shakira,” Stiles warbles.
“I will seriously throw away your pudding,” Derek threatens, and Stiles shuts up. Lydia runs a fingernail down the line of Stiles’ current medications and, frowning, pulls out her phone for a quick PubMed reference search. “They say that la loba wanders the desert, gathering the bones of dead wolves. When she has enough, she—can sing them back to life.”
~
Lydia kills Peter Hale on a Tuesday, two weeks after they’ve banished the nogitsune, seventeen days after Allison’s funeral. Lydia’s eyes had been too swollen for concealer by the time of the funeral, so she’d worn all black and her hair up in braids and the pair of earrings that Allison had gotten her for her birthday: twin silver birds, dangling at the ends of delicate chains.
“You look like a witch,” Aiden had told her, and Lydia hadn’t said anything at all. Aiden and Ethan were a necessary evil, but they’d taken on the tinge of more evil and less necessary after Allison’s funeral, like her death had thrown them into relief and they’d come up lacking.
Peter Hale doesn’t even need evaluation. Lydia poisons him and slits his throat, collects his blood in a series of autoclaved 1 L bottles lifted from the Beacon Hills High School storeroom, and burns his body. She drives downstate twenty miles and dumps the ashes into Julien Creek to prevent him from attempting any further resurrections.
His blood doesn’t actually need to be treated with anticoagulants, so Lydia puts the bottles as-is in the mini-fridge in Stiles’ bedroom, which she accesses by stealing Stiles’ house key. He’s still in the hospital. Lydia’s been to see him twice; she can never get closer than two or three feet. He—eats a lot of Cheetos.
~
She doesn’t need to kill Malia Tate; Lydia goes to her, explains what she wants to do, and asks for the fur. Probably one of the wolves would give it to her—other than Isaac, whom looking at head-on feels akin to a punch to the throat, they’re constantly stopping by Lydia’s house with thin excuses to gauge her mental health—but Malia and Peter had been related by blood and magic likes that sort of thing.
Malia listens with her head cocked, idly running her fingers through the ends of her hair. She’s living about 90% of the time as a coyote in the preserve, as far as Lydia can tell, but according to Scott she’s been turning human occasionally to come by the hospital and check up on Stiles. Although Scott hadn’t said it outright, Lydia had been perfectly capable of seeing between the lines and interpreting Malia’s actions as creepy and probably romantically inclined.
“Okay,” Malia finally says. “How much do you need?”
“As much as you can give me,” Lydia says, “although preferably at least half a pound.” She’s brought a bag for Malia to fill, which should be enough based on some rough estimation with Walgreens-brand cotton balls.
Malia shifts like no one else Lydia knows, as if she’s shrugging out of a human coat. She sits at Lydia’s feet and helps her comb out the underfur, pulling away at the extraneous fluff and nosing it into a pile so Lydia can transfer it to her bag. When Lydia has enough, she stands up and brushes her hands off on her skirt. She can’t help wrinkling her nose—this is why Lydia’s mother pays someone else to groom Prada once a month—and it makes Malia snicker. She doesn’t return to human form before bounding off, her tail sneaking after her like an exclamation point through the undergrowth.
~
According to Derek’s terrible bedtime story, Lydia has to wait until the new moon. She’s not sure that this is going to work, but the voices she hears around her have become more audible and therefore easier to interpret; Lydia can pick out the ones that are important and ignore the rest, which it turns out is really easy to do after you’ve taken AP Calculus with a bunch of idiots.
The point of the singing isn’t so much the content as the meaning behind the content, so Lydia spends the afternoon preceding the new moon making up a playlist. First she picks songs that remind her of Allison, ones from her favorite pre-party mix and that Allison had sent her on Facebook prefaced by a smiley face or a heart or a thumbs up emoticon. Then she goes further, pulling out the ones that make her bones hurt when she hears them. Some of them are wordless and low; she finds them on the Internet by listening to the keys of her laptop.
By the time the sun has set, when Lydia’s playlist is six hours long and she’s synced it to her iPod, she drives out to Beacon Hills cemetery with her bottles of blood and her bag of fur and her earbuds.
It’s finally gone biting cold; real winter, inasmuch as Beacon Hills gets one. Lydia is wearing two scarves (both Allison’s, borrowed before her death with the vague intention of being returned) and an enormous sweater with fleece-lined leggings and a pair of Hunter boots. Before she gets out of the car, Lydia braids her hair up in a coronet around her head, tucking and pinning in the ends.
She has to climb up a hill to reach Allison’s grave, which had been almost unbelievably terrible the day of Allison’s funeral—Lydia had nearly broken her ankle on a loose piece of gravel, and Scott had darted forward with his suspicious alpha werewolf reflexes and then he hadn’t let go; he’d dug his fingers into the flesh of Lydia’s arm and hip and he’d almost carried her up the hill, like she was the grieving widow, not him—and is terrible now for slightly different reasons, mainly that the one-liter bottles of Peter Hale’s blood are really fucking heavy.
Allison had been buried under a California laurel. It’ll be gorgeous in a few months, the blooms turned yellow against the encroaching greenery of the preserve. Lydia props herself against it for a few seconds, gathering her breath.
There are very few things Lydia is terrible at, and singing is one of them.
“You’re lucky this doesn’t require me not to be tone-deaf,” she tells Allison’s headstone. It says Nous protégeons ceux qui ne peuvent pas se protéger leurs-même, of course; there’s a fleur de lis over Allison’s name, embossed in silver that’s still unblemished after a few weeks’ exposure to the elements. Kira had texted an invitation to Lydia the weekend that she had driven Isaac to the Home Depot outside Redding so they could buy the chrysanthemums now planted around the headstone.
No, Lydia had texted back. She hasn’t been to Allison’s grave since the funeral.
~
For the first few hours, Lydia sings about things—love, friendship, suns that shine and clouds that obscure and raindrops that fall on people’s guitars—sticking to a lot of One Direction, Adele, and Taylor Swift because she knows all the songs by heart and she has memories of Allison singing these exact songs, drumming her fingers against the steering wheel of her car and grinning sunnily through the chorus. She dumps Peter Hale’s blood over Allison’s grave in 500 mL increments every forty-five minutes, interspersed with the occasional handful of Malia’s fur.
Eventually, when Lydia’s ears are starting to hurt from her earbuds having been in too long and she’s down to the last bottle and a half and the exhaustion is turning everything shivery and purple along the edges of her vision, the songs shift to the ones without words. She sings those in a throaty hum, the noise of it vibrating along the bones of her face and making her whole head throb. Lydia thinks about how important it is that Allison come back to her—how Allison deserves to live, how Allison is necessary and beautiful and bright—and then, when she’s nearly delirious and she only has about half a liter of blood left, Lydia sings and all she thinks is: she is mine, she is mine, she is mine.
Lydia has an affinity for the dead; she hears, when Allison wakes. The black dirt under Lydia’s knees, damp with blood and splattered with clumps of coyote fur, shivers and trembles. Lydia sings and sings and sings, opening her mouth and letting her throat throb with the magic and the death that cling to her and call to her from the strings of the world.
Allison’s knuckles are bloody and already healing when she breaks the surface, her fingers grasping for Lydia’s. “Lyd?” she rasps, gasping for air and covered in blood and fur. The skin of her shoulders, draped under the wide straps of her blue dress, barely glow in the faint light of the new moon and yet every single epithelial cell is the most beautiful thing Lydia has ever seen.
“Allison,” Lydia says, but it comes out as a hoarse croak.
“Lydia,” Allison says, and she’s halfway out of her grave as she’s pulling Lydia into her arms. They’re both crying, like the last time they’d had a sleepover and Allison had put in The Notebook to emotionally manipulate Lydia into talking about how she felt about Jackson’s new Facebook-official relationship with some girl who’d looked like London’s answer to Selena Gomez. “You didn’t—this isn’t—evil—”
“Sorry,” Lydia says into Allison’s shoulder. She smells like Malia and dirt and gunpowder. “You’re a werecoyote.” Lydia can barely speak, but Allison should be able to hear her well enough. “I’m not—actually sorry. At all.”
Allison says, “Okay,” on a breathless, confused half-laugh. She wriggles out of the ground so she can more effectively curl into Lydia’s body, like she’s spent every second of the last few weeks missing Lydia just as much as Lydia has ached for her. They’re both wretchedly dirty and Lydia’s knees hurt almost as much as her throat; likely Allison, recently resurrected, is similarly disinterested in moving. They lie on the ground under the California laurel and watch the sunrise, keeping each other warm, curved together from thigh to toe like nestled spoons.
Lydia shivers occasionally, but it’s not from the chill. She feels something other than brutally cold for the first time in weeks.