SALIGIA Chapter 1
[Prologue]
Set one month after the end of season 2.
“Ok Stiles, let’s try and go back further. Picture yourself as a young boy, try and remember something you were doing with your mother”.
Stiles nods weakly from where he is lying on the reclined leather sofa. He had already made his snarky remarks about how clichéd it was for a psychologist of any kind to actually have a leather sofa, but those thoughts were now pushed from his mind. He focussed solely on the gentle ticking of the clock, another ridiculously overused addition, but Ms. Morrell told him that it is merely there to provide a rhythm, a metronome effect to relax the mind.
Which is exactly what it was doing, and Stiles had never been so relaxed in his life, he could actually focus for once, direct his thoughts under the gentle direction of Ms. Morrell’s voice. He followed her previous instructions as to how to unlock his memory, he pictured a cloud floating in a clear blue sky, himself flying towards that cloud, straight through it, pushing away the milky haze to see what lay behind it.
“Now, can you tell me how old you are Stiles?”
“Five” Stiles replies in a monotone.
“And where are you?”
“In my dad’s study... with my mum”
“And what is she doing?”
Stiles isn’t fully aware of Ms. Morrell’s presence. Right now he is lost in his vision. He is looking at his mother through his own eyes, sitting on his dad’s desk kicking his legs haphazardly back and forth in no particular pattern or rhythm. His mother was sorting through the large black filing cabinet in the back corner of the study. She had promised to help the Sheriff to organise his old case files, and Stiles watched as she continued to shuffle through the files in the drawer. She glanced at the desk briefly, her eyes flashed violet and she continued to organise the drawer. Stiles didn’t even bat an eye as the folder she had looked at slowly floated off the desk towards her, directly into her now out-stretched hand. She filed it away neatly and closed the drawer.
“Let’s go make you some lunch” she says, turning to take Stiles’ hand and help him down from the desk. But it was Ms. Morrell’s voice that came from his mother’s mouth and his chest seized in horror at the realisation that he had forgotten his mother’s voice. He could not remember the sweet sound or her lullabies, or the way she crooned over him when he invariably injured himself. He panicked and he jolted himself out of the dream.
“She is filing away some of dad’s old case files. She is using her-” Stiles eyes fluttered in response to something happening in his vision, there was usually a delay in the narration and the actual viewing. Ms. Morrell gently leaned over and placed two fingers on his wrist, his pulse was jumping erratically and her eyebrows furrowed in concern. She needed to find out what he had seen.
“Stiles” She began before the boy rocketed upright, his chest heaving as he came dangerously close to a panic attack. But in a few seconds his entire demeanour changed and he began to calm down, briefly offering a muttered apology that he had panicked because he forgot he had to pick his dad up some food.
Ms Morrell fixed him a quizzical look but knew better than to push for something that a patient did not want to share. Even so she would need to work out a way to get Stiles to trust her. Whatever he had seen had obviously affected him greatly.
“That is no problem Stiles,” she said calmly, pretending to have bought his excuse “we are done for today’s session, go tend to your father and I will see you on Monday”. A brief look of confusion crossed his face, as if he had expected her to call him out, but then he looked relieved and... thankful?
Stiles grabbed his backpack and sprinted from the room. Ms. Morrell sighed and made a few notes in his file before closing it and placing it under lock.
~ ~ ~
Stiles mind was a literal torrent of thought. For the life of him any previous control he had ever had over his brain in the past had fled him now and he was left utterly useless, stranded among the flow of consciousness. What had he just seen? How could he have forgotten her mum’s voice? How the hell could he have forgotten her secret?
Shaking his head as he ran, Stiles pulled his phone out of his pocket, shooting off a text to Scott, and pausing just in time to question why he was about to send the same text to Derek. Before he could dwell on that though however his phone buzzed, making him jump a little, he was going to have to get used to the fact that Scott without Allison meant that he had all his time reserved for Stiles. Score!
wats wrong? how’d the psych sesh go?
Stiles fingers seemed to blur as he typed his response. He may be clumsy and uncoordinated in normal life, but when it came to texting his fingers were Olympians.
It was weird. I remembered something about my mum under hypnosis. I really need to talk to you. In person.
This time the response was instant.
ill be at yours around 7
‘Great’ he thought, ‘that only leaves me alone and bored for a whole two hours’. Sighing he finished the rest of his journey to his jeep at a reasonably sane pace.
*****
The tension in the air was stifling. Peter sat anxiously at the rickety desk on an unmatched chair, not that there was anything in the ‘house’ to match it to, and slowly scrolled through the information he had stored on his laptop. He glanced up briefly to see Derek pacing restlessly back and forth, once again pressing the redial button on his cell phone. After having bitten his tongue for so long, he finally couldn’t resist the snarky remark he made.
“I have a slight feeling that if Deaton didn’t answer the first forty-nine calls, he probably won’t answer the fiftieth”
“Shut up Peter!” Derek growled, his eyes flashing red, his forehead beginning to extrude already.
“You seriously need to work on your anger management. If all it takes is one comment to set you off, I am amazed Stiles hasn’t been Osiris’d yet.”
Derek looked like he was about to snap back, but he paused, the only indicator of his confusion was the slight tweak of his eyebrows. Peter sighed dramatically.
“Osiris. Egyptian God of the afterlife. Dismembered by his brother Set because...”
“Shut. Up. Peter.” Derek gritted through his clenched teeth.
“Look, Deaton isn’t answering. We haven’t been able to get onto him since the night Gerard vanished. Maybe we should just try something else?”
“These things are getting closer and bolder! They were weary because they could sense werewolves, but they are not afraid of our retaliation anymore! They know we are weakened.”
“We aren’t really weakened, you are just too lazy to call your pack together by force.”
“I will not force them against their will. I will not become you.” Sighing, Derek pinched the bridge of his nose, scrunching his face in frustration. “I need to find Deaton. I am going to track him tonight, the full moon should help me find his scent this time”
“Perhaps Deaton doesn’t want to be found.”
Derek looked sharply at Peter “Let us hope not, because right now he is probably the only one who knows what is going on.”
“Oh, I probably should have told you...” Peter paused, deliberately bating the glare he received moments later “I figured out what these things are. It was quite easy actually, all I needed to do was look for the specific powers they were displaying and cross reference...”
“Spit it out Peter”
“Demons” Derek’s eyebrows tweaked again, “more specifically, Lust demons. From what we have seen so far, a male and a female, working together which is strange, but not unheard of, we are dealing with a succubus and an incubus. Probably siblings, maybe even twins, which would be one hell of a way to die.”
Derek’s anticipated glare was slowly beginning to get boring. Slowly. He would still have some fun with it for a while.
“How do we kill it then?”
Peter stopped his musing. “Ah... well that is probably where we do need Deaton...seriously you need to work on some new facial expressions. One can only be intimidated by a glare so much”.
The resulting roar brought a smile to peter’s face.
*****
Derek needed to get his pack in order. He needed to find Erica and Boyd. He needed to pull Isaac away from Scott and back to him, with Scott would be even better. He needed to convince Stiles to help him willingly. And most importantly he needed to find a way to get Peter to shut up!
But putting his dysfunctional pack aside...demons. Why the fuck did it have to be demons? Of all the mythical creatures that could have attacked, it had to be demons. Demons which are so rare that nobody knows how to kill them. Demons which are so powerful that even if you did manage to find one, you would have no bloody chance of killing them, even with instructions! Demons which kill people by double-team seduction and literal feeding on life forces!
Derek pulled up his Camero in front of Deaton’s clinic, jumping out and immediately shifting to his beta form. Slowly he combed the areas close to the doors and windows, trying desperately to catch a whiff of scent. As he searched his wolf grew increasingly frustrated, his body slipped further and further into his wolf form as his anger rose.
In the end, he found nothing but the slight scent of wolfs bane and a strangely familiar woman’s scent. He disregarded that and stormed back to his car. He sat in the driver’s seat, tapping a nervous rhythm on the steering wheel, thinking idly about maybe going to try and ask Stiles to do some research of his own, then he realised what he was doing and pulled his hands back from the wheel as if they had been burned. ‘What the hell is wrong with me?’
Growling in sync with his car, he pulled out of the lot and drove home in half the time it should have taken. He bounded out of his car and up to the front door in a blur, pausing briefly to scan for other signs of life, before entering. Peter wasn’t here. But his laptop was.
Derek walked calmly over to the laptop, which was still open on a page about something called ‘Daeva’. He scoffed and was about to walk away when he noticed the top of a picture on the next page. Scrolling down he was confronted with the image of the triskele, at the centre of some kind of being. He realised he had seen it before, on the medallion that Deaton had used to demonstrate how to catch the Kanima. But why would he have a medallion of a... celtic god?
Derek was still at the laptop, scrolling through the seemingly endless information when Peter came back several hours later.
Derek didn’t even glare.
*****
Lydia lay draped across Jackson's chest, his right arm curled around her back, twirling his fingers in her hair, his left arm lying on his stomach, fingers entwined with hers. Most of the bedding was left in a crumpled heap at the end of the bed along with their scattered clothes, and the two teens were more than content to simply bask in each others presence. It had been far too long since Lydia had felt this secure, this wanted, this loved. Well, felt this way and reciprocated said attentions. Stiles was an unfortunate situation, but one that could be dealt with later. For now, she just wanted to lie there and clear her mind of everything but her boyfriend.
Her werewolf boyfriend. Her ex-kanima werewolf boyfriend. Her murdering ex-kanima werewolf boyfriend.
And now she is panicking.
Hearing her heart rate spike, Jackson reflexively tightens his hold on her, pulling her closer to him, pressing her ear over his heart. The calm beat of it helped her relax, she followed it's rhythm like a song, filling her body with the beat.
"Are you okay?" Jackson asked quietly, reluctant to ruin the serenity of the moment. "What's wrong?"
"I..." Lydia paused, composed herself and in a matter of seconds had a small speech prepared, which she scrubbed out in favour of trying to be more open "I was just thinking about everything. About werewolves, and you being the kanima, and about... the murders".
Jackson immediately tensed beneath her, his heart jumped erratically. 'He is afraid of losing me' she realised. She curled into him tighter and shook her head, willing him to relax.
"No, no, what panicked me, was that I don't care. That I am not even phased by all this. I should be worried, but I am not. I guess the whole Peter situation prepared me for it a little... Okay, a lot. But I barely even remember that. I don't want to remember that". She shuddered at the memory of the party, of all those poor people, trapped in their own personal nightmare while she was trapped inside her own body. A mental slave to Peter's will. She had noticed that Stiles seemed, different, after that party. She would have to force that out of him at some point. And on the topic of Stiles, she would also need to find out why he keeps the contact details of an entire gay club's worth of Transvestites... and maybe get a few of their contact details herself.
"On an unrelated note" she continued "With Allison MIA, I am going to force Stiles to be my new best friend. I want your blessing".
Jackson choked on air for a few minutes before turning is absolutely livid expression on Lydia. "I'm sorry WHAT?! Why would I want you to buddy up with the kid who has fangirled over you since he was conceived!"
Lydia scoffed, tossing her hair over her shoulder. "Because he needs a friend to talk to that he can trust. And besides, if you really thought he ever had a chance at getting me, you would have put an end to his attraction a looooong time ago. However, if he does become my friend, you are going to have to start being nice to him!"
Jackson quirked his eyebrow and gave her his best 'not-happening' face. Lydia sighed dramatically.
"Just treat him like you do Danny then. Besides, I have a suspicion that the two of them aren't really that much different. And that suspicion will be confirmed in next to no time at all if you would just give me your damn blessing".
"Why do you even care about my blessing?"
At this Lydia stopped. 'Because I don't want to lose you again...'
"I don't. I am going to do it anyway, but I would prefer not having to disguise it from you".
"Fine. I give you my solemn blessing. Now do I need to hit you two with a wine bottle so you don't sink?"
Lydia smiled "Oh, I think that Ship has already sailed, and maybe hit an iceberg or two".
The two of them lay against each other in silence, slowly drifting off to sleep as the waning moon rose.
[Chapter 2]