dynamite with a laser beam [part iv]
[part iii]
this time i know it’s for real | 2011
So the Camaro might’ve been an anger-induced purchase, Laura fully recognizes that, but it’s not exactly like she’d been spending any of the ridiculous amounts of money she and Derek had collected from seven insurance policies and if she wanted to buy a Camaro in the aftermath of a shitty life decision like falling in heavy lust with the older brother of the hunter who murdered almost the entirety of her family, it was her prerogative.
“Okay,” Derek had said in response to a highly edited version of this line of reasoning. “Do I get to drive it?”
“No,” Laura had gasped, mock-affronted, and then they had proceeded to have a wrestling match over the keys, which Laura had won by kneeing Derek in the nuts, a move that was about 78% accident and 22% cruel intent.
She’s thankful for her splurge when she’s halfway across Ohio and the radio is a vast wasteland of Kenny Chesney and AC/DC and she can let out some of her frustration by gunning the engine in her snarling panther of a car. There’s not a cop for twenty miles and it’s close to ten at night so she has the stretch outside of Toledo almost entirely to herself.
Early the next morning, Laura stops at a gas station in Montpelier and refills her tank. She’s been leery of rest stops in general ever since that first trip from Beacon Hills, with Derek swallowing down a barbed arrow from a set of hunters that shouldn’t have even known they were there, but this one appears normal and, when she pays the cashier for a cup of exceptionally shitty coffee and a packaged pastry, he stares down her shirt and doesn’t scent of nervousness.
Laura takes the opportunity provided by a nearly empty stop and calls Derek. “What,” he answers. “Laura, it’s seven in the goddamn morning. I had a shift until two last night.”
“Poor baby,” Laura coos. “Listen to you. College coddled you.”
“Yeah, and it turned you into a psychopath,” Derek mumbles. “I’m hanging up.”
“No, no, wait,” Laura says hurriedly, laughing. “This is the last time I’m going to stop for a while; tell me how you are.” She can diagnose plenty through the phone, like his heart and his breathing and the rustling that tells her that he’s not at home. “Or, tell me who?”
There’s a pause as Derek peels himself out of bed and walks across a carpeted floor. “Just a girl from one of my classes last year,” he says dismissively after there’s a snick of a closed door. “She showed up at the shop with a busted fuel line.”
“I bet something was busted,” Laura says with a heavy-handed snicker. “And I’m sure you fixed her up real good.”
“You’re hilarious,” Derek says flatly. In a whip-fast change of conversation, he says accusingly, “Are you eating rest stop shit for breakfast?”
“No,” Laura lies, shoving the pastry into her cheek so she can speak freely.
Derek snorts. “’Eat your vegetables, Derek,’” he says in high-pitched mimicry of Laura’s voice. “’Teenage werewolves can’t survive solely on pizza.’ You’re such a hypocrite.”
Swallowing a particularly tough piece of overly sweet preserved apple, Laura insists, “I’m older, it’s different.”
“I’m bigger,” Derek growls, and Laura giggles.
“Did your friend find that kind of thing attractive?” she asks. “The whole monosyllabic mechanic shtick? I’m telling you, Derek, ever since Drive came out, girls are digging it.” She tries to wash down the pastry with coffee but it tastes like phlegm and dirty stove burners. “Yeck.”
“Stop pretending coffee has any effect on your body,” Derek tells her irritably, completely ignoring her point about Ryan Gosling.
“It’s psychosomatic,” Laura reminds him. The argument is warm and familiar, like the hiking boots that Laura kicks against the bumper of her car. “Mornings aren’t mornings without coffee.” She means the smell, the tingle along the back of her throat that comes from waking up to the soft drip drip drip of the automated coffeemaker in the kitchen. She means waking up and knowing that their mother is in the kitchen, performing the only cooking task she can be relied upon not to fuck up, running through the daily crossword with her reading glasses sliding down her nose.
“Yeah,” Derek says after a long pause.
It will always hurt; it will always cut Laura’s chest in half to think about it. But New York and Pittsburgh have numbed some of it and Laura has shoved away the rest. She’s built a wall between herself and Derek and the memories, and it’s more stable now than it has ever been.
~
Laura hasn’t seen Chris Argent in two years, which is smart of him. She’s still not entirely sure she won’t kill him first and regret it later, when she’s swallowing down his blood in her mouth and picking pieces of hair from between her teeth.
~
Twenty miles outside of Des Moines, Laura recognizes within herself the tingles that precede a break with reality and to stave off the shivers that isolation bring with it, she flicks on the radio. She could plug her phone into the car’s stereo and just listen to the collection of music she has stashed there, but Laura likes the chore of flicking between stations. She weighs Katy Perry (no) against Linkin Park (no) against 80s hair bands (NO) and then lands on an inoffensive alternative station that seems to be having a Bon Iver conniption.
She likes Bon Iver in theory but by the time St. Vincent makes it on, Laura wants to claw out her own eyes and pour them into a singer-songwriter’s guitar, so she hits scan again and immediately stops because Derek hates Nicki Minaj with single-minded disdain and Laura likes taking advantage.
It turns out that listening to “Moment 4 Life” without Derek cringing in the passenger seat is at most half as fun, so Laura gives up on bothering an imaginary Derek and switches to NPR. That lasts until Omaha, and then, stuck in a traffic jam, fingers trembling against the wheel, Laura debates the merits of calling her brother and listening to his heartbeat versus finding music she can actually stand. There’s the possibility that nothing will calm her, but Laura has to do something. Every trip to Beacon Hills ends up like this-Laura shivering and antsy without her pack, untethered and probably slightly unhinged-and at this point, the only question is when the break will hit.
It hits in Lexington.
“This is healthy,” Laura lies to herself. “This is understandable.” She plugs in her phone and opens the music app, eyes on the playlist labeled MOM. She’s made it to Nebraska, at least, which is the furthest she’s ever managed without pulling over to the shoulder and talking herself out of a panic attack.
The only way she survives this process is to make a conscious shift in her operating techniques, so she presses play and thinks, This is fine, it’s okay, it’ll be okay, and the first song that comes up on shuffle is “Bicycle Race.”
Laura’s nose always tricks her here; she can smell her mother and Imogene, the peculiar blend of their twin scents, cedar and laurel and Chanel No. 5. Her mother had stopped wearing perfume when the twins had been born and it was obvious from the way that they had busted their first playpen that they would be a werewolves, but she always smelled of it strongly, like she’d worn it for so long that it’d become an integral part of herself.
Laura hasn’t cried since Pittsburgh, and it’s not like Freddie Mercury’s voice is capable of actually wringing moisture from her, so she focuses on the road and the police nearby and the chatter on scanners about traffic and speed traps and the way that the outside changes the further west she drives. Fields and desert and mountains blur together until it’s nearing eleven and Laura is in Susanville, her usual stopover the night before her visit. It’s just outside of her territory but there haven’t aren’t any packs between Beacon Hills and Reno and she’s never run into any trouble.
Out, west, in front of Laura, stretches the forest and then the coast. Her nose isn’t good enough to catch the salt but she can imagine it, like she can imagine Imogene leaning into Laura’s mother and shouting, “Caviar and cigarettes!” and laughing.
Laura checks into a motel off of the highway and eats a burger in her room, listening to the playlist on its lowest volume setting with headphones. Her fries are soggy and cold by the time she gets to them and she sticks them one by one into an open packet of ketchup, humming to the chorus of “Sexy Sadie” and ignoring the sound of her neighbors having enthusiastic extramarital sex.
Susanville is just deserted enough that Laura can throw away her trash, leave her phone charging, and slip down the road to where the forest melts into the fringe of the town. She strips quickly, skin warming from the impending rush of the change, and puts her clothes high off the ground, in a tree that doesn’t look like it’s hiding any animals that would likely take Laura’s clothes and use them for nest-building.
The full moon is a week and a half away and Laura takes the shift in a jump, throwing her wolf forward and her human back, and she lands in a furred crouch. Animals scatter at the sudden emergence of a predator; overhead, an owl screeches and a mouse squeaks and bolts for cover. New York is home because her pack is there, but the forests of California are always Laura’s and they call to her in way that she hadn’t anticipated, her first time back in Beacon Hills after two years away. Her human is scarred by the loss of her family, but her wolf craves to stay and build; her wolf wants to plant roots in Beacon Hills and grow a new pack.
Laura burns through her anticipation for the next day and stalks a deer for the fun of it, tackling it to the ground and playfully gumming at its neck before letting it go. It’d be good for the rest of the forest if Laura just killed it, but she’s not hungry and that seems like a waste. She lets the deer, heart rabbit-fast and frenetic, bolt for the river, and she half-heartedly pounces on a few hares before she admits to herself that she can’t hunt the buzzing out of her blood and she returns to her motel to channel surf for the rest of the night.
~
Her uncle has a new nurse.
“Oh,” she says, lips pursed, when she sights Laura. She’s blond and hard-looking and she looks like she smells ruthless, although Laura can’t pick things like that out of someone she’s never met before. “Ms. Hale.”
“Hi,” Laura says, offering her hand. The nurse’s pulse beats weakly against Laura’s fingertips, a stark contrast to the firmness of her handshake. “Nice to meet you.” Laura’s cheerfulness is icy cold against her face, where her friendliness is fixed with iron bolts to keep it from slipping.
The nurse updates Laura on her uncle’s condition-as if Laura’s going to be surprised by the medical-babble code for ‘no change’-and Laura nods in the right places and thanks her and then slips sideways through the door into Peter’s room, where he’s been wrapped in a terrycloth robe and dropped into a chair.
Laura has known since she was small that wishing her wolf away was futile and probably suicidal, and Peter is the evidence that she never needed to confirm this. With his wolf gone, his face blank and eyes guileless and wide, he’s less than half of a person. Laura knows that Derek has too many issues with his wolf to count; part of her wants to show him Peter and remind him how wrong it is to be at odds with your wolf, but Derek isn’t ready for Peter.
“Hey,” says Laura steadily, sliding into the chair set across from Peter’s. “It’s Laura, Uncle Peter.” His heart is steady and empty and long, a hairsbreadth off from the steady beeping of the monitor in the corner of his room. “It’s, um, been a year. Like always.”
Out in the hallway, the nurse finally stops lurking and returns, steps dragging and reluctant, to the nurse’s station. “I guess you’d want to know how Derek’s doing. I mentioned last time that I was here that he finished a year early and graduated. In the grand tradition of lit majors everywhere, he’s taken a job completely unrelated to literature or the analysis of it. He’s working at this garage in Brooklyn as an apprentice to the oldest Polish immigrant in the entirety of the state of New York. His advisor from NYU fell on her knees and begged him to apply to the graduate program this year. He’s thinking about it.”
Laura talks at Peter for two more hours, anecdotes about Derek’s work in the garage (“He works so many shifts that I’m pretty sure Mr. Lukscai thinks he’s secretly a homeless orphan, which is one out of two, I guess,”) and a few filthy comments about his forays into Manhattan’s clubbing scene (“It’s like no one’s ever seen a bisexual with an eight-pack before; he comes home and has to systematically delete like forty new numbers from his phone”), and then she excuses herself to pick at an unappetizing lunch in the hospital cafeteria.
She spends the second half of her trip reading Peter all of the headlines from the domestic and international sections of the Beacon Hills Daily Mirror and then the entirety of the arts section, which is four pages long. For the last three hours, she continues her annual tradition of reading from a book that she stole from the top of the stack on Derek’s bedside table. It changes every week; this time it’s Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.
Laura monitors Peter’s heartbeat out of habit more than anything else as she reads. Unsurprisingly, considering that it’s from Derek’s collection and that the title features the word ‘sadness’ in conjunction with ‘cake,’ the book is a mess of feelings and Laura’s voice begins to die halfway through, as the third hour draws to a close. Over what Laura personally feels are the worst parts, the ones that crush whole parts of her, Peter’s heart runs smooth.
As she starts to leave, it jerks almost imperceptibly. The monitors show no sign of it, but Laura can hear it, clear and shocking, a marked stumble in an even, loping stride. “Uncle Peter?” she whispers, and she begins to sit back down.
Like brutally unsympathetic magic, the nurse appears in the doorway. “Visiting hours are over,” she says waspishly.
“No, I know,” Laura says automatically, mouth moving even as her hands reach out for Peter’s, propped in his lap. “Give me a minute, please.”
“If you want more time,” the nurse replies, “you should consider coming more frequently.”
“Peter,” Laura whispers, but he gives no sign of having heard her; his heart and breathing are achingly steady. They’re a pointed contrast to Laura’s frantic pounding. “Can you hear me?” she adds a second later.
Peter does nothing.
“You need to leave,” the nurse says. She sounds as if she’s pretending to be sympathetic but can’t quite manage the charade.
“I know,” Laura says. “Shit-I mean, yeah.” She drops her hands from where they are hovering in front of Peter, braced as though she’s feeling for his aura or some other kind of metaphysical bullshit.
As if to ensure that Laura won’t sneak back inside, the nurse tails Laura all the way to the exit. “Have a nice night,” she says pointedly, and turns on a sharp heel to return inside. Laura wonders abstractly why she’s still working, eight hours later, when it had been obvious from her clothes that she’d come out of the night shift that morning. Then she feels a small stab of guilt about conditions that make it so that her uncle’s nurse has to pick up double shifts. A kid at home? A husband who’s been laid off?
Laura and Derek seem incredibly lucky in comparison, if you forget that they got their ridiculously Bruce Waynian amount of money because everyone in their family was murdered by Derek’s first serious girlfriend.
At five in the evening, Beacon Hills’ shoddy nightlife is just coming into its own. There are two new restaurants since the last time Laura was in town, both on the main street, and she debates between them before deciding, like she does every time she’s in town, that the emotional wreckage is not worth the trade-off of good food; she picks up Taco Bell on her way to the Preserve.
Laura eats the Taco Bell on the lawn outside of the house, facing into the forest, pretending that she can’t map a happy family memory onto every inch of overgrown lawn, like she can’t smell the brokenness of the house under the acrid sharpness of her tacos. The trick takes most of Laura’s considerable powers of self-deceit and then she can’t do it any more; she looks.
The top floor, where Natalie and Erin had shared a room, is gone completely. More ceiling tiles have fallen into the kitchen since the last time Laura was at the house, a year ago. She can count the number of beams that have shifted, the splinters that have disintegrated, and the animals that have moved in.
“Hi,” Laura finally says. She can hear where a family of voles has built a burrow underneath the driveway; they sound happy for voles, nested down in grasses. If she listens, silent and frozen in place, she can hear the squirrels running up trees and owls shaking out their wings and weasels sneaking through the undergrowth.
The house is a black hole; nothing comes from inside it, even though Laura knows that an extensive mouse family has colonized it. It even seems to suck in the light from the fading sun and reflect nothing in return. She imagines it does something poetic and picturesque like that to her, but she’s locked away the part of her that the house can hurt, and now it’s just a wreck of a piece of property. She’s fairly certain that she and Derek are in violation of about three kazillion zoning laws by keeping it standing.
“I miss you,” Laura says, and immediately feels like an idiot. The words are dwarfed by the noise of the forest, the persistent buzzing of life that comes from having millions of creatures crawling over one another inside the Preserve. Surrounded by so many reminders of goddamn Lion King circle of life bullshit, she feels awkward and out of place and mostly like a heroine in a shitty independent drama. If this were a movie, Laura could guarantee that Derek would be watching with his critically engaged eyebrows locked low over his eyes, taking in every film school nuance of the scene.
“Shit,” Laura mumbles under her breath.
It’s still true, of course. She misses them, beyond the placating bullshit of a Hallmark card’s worth of sentiment: Laura aches for her family, her heart burns in her chest and the ash suffocates her lungs. Maybe this is how humans feel, after they get the bite: a large chunk of Laura has vanished, and in its place is a sharp, clawing agony.
“This,” Laura says to no one, “is why I rarely visit this fucking house. I’m turning into Derek. Fuck.”
The moment that Laura realizes this scene can be reasonable construed as her talking to the Camaro, she gives up trying to heal herself through forced witnessing of her childhood home crumble before her eyes. She folds the collar of her jacket up so that it rests against the back of her neck and then she stuffs her hands into the pockets and sets off into the woods. She could shift and do this faster as a wolf, but she enjoys the crunch of the leaves under her hiking boots; she likes kicking the dirt and watching it fall with human eyes.
Her territory ends three miles south of the house, where the tree line falls away from the river. Laura presses her back against three of the largest trees and sits for a few minutes, letting her scent soak into the wood. She could pee on them, which is what her dad had done, but Laura’s human is at the forefront, enthralled by the pretty picture that the moon makes as it pushes above the trees and catches on the river, and Laura’s human doesn’t pee on trees.
Absently watching the play of the light, Laura plucks her hair out of its braid and then rubs her head against the tree, letting the bark catch on her hair and pull some of it out. She thinks about combing the bits of tree out after she’s finished, but she’s just going to have to repeat the process in two miles when she reaches the fringe of Hale land towards Susanville and it’s not like there’s anyone likely to go Clinton Kelly on her about her style choices.
Because she’s in a What Not to Wear frame of reference, it takes Laura a few seconds to peel herself out when she sees the flash of blue-grey out of the corner of her eye. The scent hits her seconds later; he’s downwind, clever of him, and Laura’s first, incredibly illogical thought is, Fuck, of all the people who could give me shit about the goddamn hair.
“Holy fuck,” is the first thing she says, as Peter spins and launches towards her, fangs distended from his jaw, face long and narrow like something out of a Tim Burton film. He’s incredibly fast, before even taking into account the six years he’s spent as a vegetable in Beacon Hills Memorial, and the Alpha senses take over without any conscious input from Laura’s reflexes. One second, Laura is facing down her uncle, his fingers distended into angry claws, and the next she’s on top of him, knee in his lower back, claws gripped around his throat as she arches his back and forces him into the curve.
“Hello, Laura,” Peter says, as if Laura has come by the house in Lookingglass for tea.
“What the fuck,” Laura spits out in a half-growl, tightening her fingers around his throat. She leans over and presses her nose into the angled curve of his jaw, directly behind his ear. He smells like hospitals and death and slick, new skin but his wolf is still wrong. “Peter?”
“I would think that was obvious,” Peter observes, his heart a metronome under Laura’s fingertips.
“Obvious, he says,” Laura says, the lightness of impending hysteria battling against the lower, threatening chords of her wolf’s voice. “Yes, obvious. My comatose uncle wandering around the woods, obvious.”
“Don’t be hysterical,” Peter says sharply, and his voice is so familiar, the whip-like strength of it, against the unfamiliar backdrop of his new wolf.
“Why are you different,” Laura asks in a flat voice. There’s this conflicted buzzing under her main thought process, a difficult-to-ignore Peter woke up why did he wake up. She wants to think we’re three now but Peter still isn’t pack.
“You’re a smart girl, Laura,” Peter says, speaking calmly into the top layer of dead leaves. “What do you smell?”
He says this in the intense way he’d always asked questions, during the afternoons that he came over to speak with her father and then ended up with Laura and Natalie and Erin in the living room, commandeering their scent memory games and teaching them how to disguise their mark from other wolves.
The old need to be right and to please, a need that Laura hasn’t felt since she sat numbly on the hood of her mother’s car with Derek pressed shaking into her side as Sheriff Wallace and the rest of the Beacon County police department combed over the smoldering wreck of her childhood, tells Laura to offer her answer slowly, to make sure that she’s saying what he wants.
And then Laura realizes, fuck what he wants, she’s his goddamn Alpha. “You’re not pack anymore,” Laura says, sounding more confident than she really feels. “I heard your heart stop, the night of the fire. A wolf’s heart never stops.” It’s like Laura’s thesis advisor is urging her on to the natural conclusion. What do we take away from all of this? “Ergo. New wolf.”
“Brava,” Peter says quietly, with palpable good grace and his odd, biting humor.
“Why the healing delay?” Laura asks. “Oh god, scratch that, why everything?” She presses more of her weight onto her knee, fighting down the urge to let him go.
“Am I going to be allowed to answer without a mouthful of dead leaves?” Peter asks politely.
“No,” Laura growls, “because you just attacked me.”
“I’m still unfamiliar with this new consciousness, Laura,” Peter explains steadily. “I didn’t know who you were.”
His heartbeat doesn’t tag it as a lie; Laura’s native paranoia battles the part of her that is shrieking HE’S AWAKE and the little girl that wants Uncle Peter to take over control of this mess of a situation and figure out a solution. Next year, the seven-year grace period will be up and the Hale territory will be threatened unless Laura can rebuild a pack; Derek is still too broken to even really think about Beacon Hills, let alone coming back; Laura still dreams about Chris some times, and she wakes up slick and furious and helpless in the face of his scent sinking into her skin.
Slowly, for a wolf, Laura rises to her feet and lets Peter stand. “So?” she demands aggressively, keeping her knees loose enough that-well, just in case.
Peter shrugs, elegant and slow, and adjusts the blue terrycloth hospital robe at his wrists. Laura hasn't spent enough time with him since the fire to allow the burns to become familiar; they stand out, like streaks of milk along the side of his face. She thinks of the house in Lookingglass and Miles’ toys scattered on the floor, Joanna’s handwriting on the calendar taped to their fridge.
“Things aren’t right,” Peter finally says, his posture loose and casual. Nothing about him indicates that anything is amiss, but there’s an old tilt to his head that sends short, shivery pulses down Laura’s back. Her wolf whines somewhere deep in her throat. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you’ve left a lot of loose ends walking around on borrowed time, Laura.”
“Don’t be cliché, Peter,” Laura snips.
“Don’t be lazy,” Peter admonishes right back; he’s better at it. “Emotional vulnerability is all well and good in a girl with your classical bone structure, but you’re only supposed to seem weak.”
Laura rocks back on her heels and huffs, offended. “Right, because the guy who spent the last six years in a coma is clearly qualified to discuss the decisions his Alpha made while he was a vegetable.”
“You’re not my Alpha,” Peter points out, and the silky quality of his voice has her wolf thinking, Fuck.
“Yes, semantics are clearly important right now,” Laura says dismissively. She can feel herself scrambling to return them to some kind of equilibrium. Peter’s presence is pulling out parts of her that haven’t seen the sun in years; she doesn’t even know what she wants, just that there’s a sticky ache in her chest and the back of her eyes and the base of her nose. “But if it’s that much of a concern for you, we can do it now.” She lets her eyes fill with bloody color. “The full moon is a week and a half away; plenty strong.”
Peter frowns and then sighs, theatrically, and tosses his head. “Let’s focus on the important matters at hand. The Argent girl, for example, and her merry band of helpers.”
Laura laughs helplessly; it’s not a pleasant sound. “Kate isn’t important, Peter. Derek is important. Pack is important.”
“What pack?” Peter asks with a derisive eyebrow lift. “You haven’t been biting anyone, have you?”
It’s always been amazing to Laura how quickly Peter is able to get under someone’s skin. He basically exists to define the term little shit. “No,” she says, remarkably steady considering that her wolf wants to pin Peter to the ground again. “It’s just Derek and I.” Saying ‘just’ feels like a betrayal of how hard Laura has worked to keep herself and Derek alive.
Peter tsks. “You weren’t prepared to be Alpha.”
“No shit,” Laura snarls. “I thought it was going to be Natalie or Erin after Dad, or maybe Michael. No one ever thought I would be Alpha. But I am your fucking Alpha and my only goal is to keep my brother and my pack alive.”
“Oh yes,” Peter agrees, “his trauma really must be something to behold. All of that guilt churning his insides.” Queerly focused on Laura-on her neck-he asks, “Does he have dreams, Laura? About us inside of the house with his lady friend laughing herself sick outside?”
Laura’s tongue feels swollen against the roof of her mouth. “I don’t know,” she admits after a long pause. She doesn’t dream at all; she’s never thought to ask Derek about it.
“I would,” Peter says musingly. “They would haunt me.”
To Laura’s nose, Peter smells overwhelmingly like the hospital and his strange blond nurse. It’s a peculiarly herbaceous scent; Laura’s nose wrinkles as he shifts from one foot to the other and she’s hit with a wave of it. “As wonderful as it is to have your highly qualified opinion of Derek’s mental status,” Laura says, relishing in the bitchiness, “I want to return your attention to the pertinent question on the table of why?”
Peter tilts his head to the left. “Laura, dear,” he says. “That’s far more complex than you would think.”
Laura spreads her hands to show that they’re surrounded by hundreds of acres of federally protected forest. “It’s not like we don’t have time, Uncle Peter,” she points out.
“Well, you might,” Peter says. “But I’m on a bit of a tight schedule.”
~
Peter presses his fingers to her forehead, gently pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Fuck you,” Laura gasps. The words rattle wetly through her chest. “Seriously, fuck you. I hope Derek rips your spine out.” She lacks the strength to make the words any stronger than a forceful whisper. Her healing factor is working steadily, sluggishly plugging along, but Laura already smells death on herself in thick, cloying waves.
“I imagine he will,” Peter admits.
There are a lot of things Laura wants to say: pithy things about Peter being as crazy as a box of frogs and sentimental things about her dead family and sad things about Derek, who really will be alone and have a legitimate reason to brood and there won’t be anyone to tease him out of his moods-and other, unexpected feelings, ones about Chris Argent that aren’t directly related to homicide or sex-but death doesn’t exactly pride itself on waiting around for you to finish your shit.
“F-fuck,” Laura wheezes on an inhale, desperately praying, I hope Derek finds the key to the storage container in Eureka, and then the last of the flat, tar scent of death rolls over her head;
and that’s it.
this time i know it’s for real | 2011
So the Camaro might’ve been an anger-induced purchase, Laura fully recognizes that, but it’s not exactly like she’d been spending any of the ridiculous amounts of money she and Derek had collected from seven insurance policies and if she wanted to buy a Camaro in the aftermath of a shitty life decision like falling in heavy lust with the older brother of the hunter who murdered almost the entirety of her family, it was her prerogative.
“Okay,” Derek had said in response to a highly edited version of this line of reasoning. “Do I get to drive it?”
“No,” Laura had gasped, mock-affronted, and then they had proceeded to have a wrestling match over the keys, which Laura had won by kneeing Derek in the nuts, a move that was about 78% accident and 22% cruel intent.
She’s thankful for her splurge when she’s halfway across Ohio and the radio is a vast wasteland of Kenny Chesney and AC/DC and she can let out some of her frustration by gunning the engine in her snarling panther of a car. There’s not a cop for twenty miles and it’s close to ten at night so she has the stretch outside of Toledo almost entirely to herself.
Early the next morning, Laura stops at a gas station in Montpelier and refills her tank. She’s been leery of rest stops in general ever since that first trip from Beacon Hills, with Derek swallowing down a barbed arrow from a set of hunters that shouldn’t have even known they were there, but this one appears normal and, when she pays the cashier for a cup of exceptionally shitty coffee and a packaged pastry, he stares down her shirt and doesn’t scent of nervousness.
Laura takes the opportunity provided by a nearly empty stop and calls Derek. “What,” he answers. “Laura, it’s seven in the goddamn morning. I had a shift until two last night.”
“Poor baby,” Laura coos. “Listen to you. College coddled you.”
“Yeah, and it turned you into a psychopath,” Derek mumbles. “I’m hanging up.”
“No, no, wait,” Laura says hurriedly, laughing. “This is the last time I’m going to stop for a while; tell me how you are.” She can diagnose plenty through the phone, like his heart and his breathing and the rustling that tells her that he’s not at home. “Or, tell me who?”
There’s a pause as Derek peels himself out of bed and walks across a carpeted floor. “Just a girl from one of my classes last year,” he says dismissively after there’s a snick of a closed door. “She showed up at the shop with a busted fuel line.”
“I bet something was busted,” Laura says with a heavy-handed snicker. “And I’m sure you fixed her up real good.”
“You’re hilarious,” Derek says flatly. In a whip-fast change of conversation, he says accusingly, “Are you eating rest stop shit for breakfast?”
“No,” Laura lies, shoving the pastry into her cheek so she can speak freely.
Derek snorts. “’Eat your vegetables, Derek,’” he says in high-pitched mimicry of Laura’s voice. “’Teenage werewolves can’t survive solely on pizza.’ You’re such a hypocrite.”
Swallowing a particularly tough piece of overly sweet preserved apple, Laura insists, “I’m older, it’s different.”
“I’m bigger,” Derek growls, and Laura giggles.
“Did your friend find that kind of thing attractive?” she asks. “The whole monosyllabic mechanic shtick? I’m telling you, Derek, ever since Drive came out, girls are digging it.” She tries to wash down the pastry with coffee but it tastes like phlegm and dirty stove burners. “Yeck.”
“Stop pretending coffee has any effect on your body,” Derek tells her irritably, completely ignoring her point about Ryan Gosling.
“It’s psychosomatic,” Laura reminds him. The argument is warm and familiar, like the hiking boots that Laura kicks against the bumper of her car. “Mornings aren’t mornings without coffee.” She means the smell, the tingle along the back of her throat that comes from waking up to the soft drip drip drip of the automated coffeemaker in the kitchen. She means waking up and knowing that their mother is in the kitchen, performing the only cooking task she can be relied upon not to fuck up, running through the daily crossword with her reading glasses sliding down her nose.
“Yeah,” Derek says after a long pause.
It will always hurt; it will always cut Laura’s chest in half to think about it. But New York and Pittsburgh have numbed some of it and Laura has shoved away the rest. She’s built a wall between herself and Derek and the memories, and it’s more stable now than it has ever been.
~
Laura hasn’t seen Chris Argent in two years, which is smart of him. She’s still not entirely sure she won’t kill him first and regret it later, when she’s swallowing down his blood in her mouth and picking pieces of hair from between her teeth.
~
Twenty miles outside of Des Moines, Laura recognizes within herself the tingles that precede a break with reality and to stave off the shivers that isolation bring with it, she flicks on the radio. She could plug her phone into the car’s stereo and just listen to the collection of music she has stashed there, but Laura likes the chore of flicking between stations. She weighs Katy Perry (no) against Linkin Park (no) against 80s hair bands (NO) and then lands on an inoffensive alternative station that seems to be having a Bon Iver conniption.
She likes Bon Iver in theory but by the time St. Vincent makes it on, Laura wants to claw out her own eyes and pour them into a singer-songwriter’s guitar, so she hits scan again and immediately stops because Derek hates Nicki Minaj with single-minded disdain and Laura likes taking advantage.
It turns out that listening to “Moment 4 Life” without Derek cringing in the passenger seat is at most half as fun, so Laura gives up on bothering an imaginary Derek and switches to NPR. That lasts until Omaha, and then, stuck in a traffic jam, fingers trembling against the wheel, Laura debates the merits of calling her brother and listening to his heartbeat versus finding music she can actually stand. There’s the possibility that nothing will calm her, but Laura has to do something. Every trip to Beacon Hills ends up like this-Laura shivering and antsy without her pack, untethered and probably slightly unhinged-and at this point, the only question is when the break will hit.
It hits in Lexington.
“This is healthy,” Laura lies to herself. “This is understandable.” She plugs in her phone and opens the music app, eyes on the playlist labeled MOM. She’s made it to Nebraska, at least, which is the furthest she’s ever managed without pulling over to the shoulder and talking herself out of a panic attack.
The only way she survives this process is to make a conscious shift in her operating techniques, so she presses play and thinks, This is fine, it’s okay, it’ll be okay, and the first song that comes up on shuffle is “Bicycle Race.”
Laura’s nose always tricks her here; she can smell her mother and Imogene, the peculiar blend of their twin scents, cedar and laurel and Chanel No. 5. Her mother had stopped wearing perfume when the twins had been born and it was obvious from the way that they had busted their first playpen that they would be a werewolves, but she always smelled of it strongly, like she’d worn it for so long that it’d become an integral part of herself.
Laura hasn’t cried since Pittsburgh, and it’s not like Freddie Mercury’s voice is capable of actually wringing moisture from her, so she focuses on the road and the police nearby and the chatter on scanners about traffic and speed traps and the way that the outside changes the further west she drives. Fields and desert and mountains blur together until it’s nearing eleven and Laura is in Susanville, her usual stopover the night before her visit. It’s just outside of her territory but there haven’t aren’t any packs between Beacon Hills and Reno and she’s never run into any trouble.
Out, west, in front of Laura, stretches the forest and then the coast. Her nose isn’t good enough to catch the salt but she can imagine it, like she can imagine Imogene leaning into Laura’s mother and shouting, “Caviar and cigarettes!” and laughing.
Laura checks into a motel off of the highway and eats a burger in her room, listening to the playlist on its lowest volume setting with headphones. Her fries are soggy and cold by the time she gets to them and she sticks them one by one into an open packet of ketchup, humming to the chorus of “Sexy Sadie” and ignoring the sound of her neighbors having enthusiastic extramarital sex.
Susanville is just deserted enough that Laura can throw away her trash, leave her phone charging, and slip down the road to where the forest melts into the fringe of the town. She strips quickly, skin warming from the impending rush of the change, and puts her clothes high off the ground, in a tree that doesn’t look like it’s hiding any animals that would likely take Laura’s clothes and use them for nest-building.
The full moon is a week and a half away and Laura takes the shift in a jump, throwing her wolf forward and her human back, and she lands in a furred crouch. Animals scatter at the sudden emergence of a predator; overhead, an owl screeches and a mouse squeaks and bolts for cover. New York is home because her pack is there, but the forests of California are always Laura’s and they call to her in way that she hadn’t anticipated, her first time back in Beacon Hills after two years away. Her human is scarred by the loss of her family, but her wolf craves to stay and build; her wolf wants to plant roots in Beacon Hills and grow a new pack.
Laura burns through her anticipation for the next day and stalks a deer for the fun of it, tackling it to the ground and playfully gumming at its neck before letting it go. It’d be good for the rest of the forest if Laura just killed it, but she’s not hungry and that seems like a waste. She lets the deer, heart rabbit-fast and frenetic, bolt for the river, and she half-heartedly pounces on a few hares before she admits to herself that she can’t hunt the buzzing out of her blood and she returns to her motel to channel surf for the rest of the night.
~
Her uncle has a new nurse.
“Oh,” she says, lips pursed, when she sights Laura. She’s blond and hard-looking and she looks like she smells ruthless, although Laura can’t pick things like that out of someone she’s never met before. “Ms. Hale.”
“Hi,” Laura says, offering her hand. The nurse’s pulse beats weakly against Laura’s fingertips, a stark contrast to the firmness of her handshake. “Nice to meet you.” Laura’s cheerfulness is icy cold against her face, where her friendliness is fixed with iron bolts to keep it from slipping.
The nurse updates Laura on her uncle’s condition-as if Laura’s going to be surprised by the medical-babble code for ‘no change’-and Laura nods in the right places and thanks her and then slips sideways through the door into Peter’s room, where he’s been wrapped in a terrycloth robe and dropped into a chair.
Laura has known since she was small that wishing her wolf away was futile and probably suicidal, and Peter is the evidence that she never needed to confirm this. With his wolf gone, his face blank and eyes guileless and wide, he’s less than half of a person. Laura knows that Derek has too many issues with his wolf to count; part of her wants to show him Peter and remind him how wrong it is to be at odds with your wolf, but Derek isn’t ready for Peter.
“Hey,” says Laura steadily, sliding into the chair set across from Peter’s. “It’s Laura, Uncle Peter.” His heart is steady and empty and long, a hairsbreadth off from the steady beeping of the monitor in the corner of his room. “It’s, um, been a year. Like always.”
Out in the hallway, the nurse finally stops lurking and returns, steps dragging and reluctant, to the nurse’s station. “I guess you’d want to know how Derek’s doing. I mentioned last time that I was here that he finished a year early and graduated. In the grand tradition of lit majors everywhere, he’s taken a job completely unrelated to literature or the analysis of it. He’s working at this garage in Brooklyn as an apprentice to the oldest Polish immigrant in the entirety of the state of New York. His advisor from NYU fell on her knees and begged him to apply to the graduate program this year. He’s thinking about it.”
Laura talks at Peter for two more hours, anecdotes about Derek’s work in the garage (“He works so many shifts that I’m pretty sure Mr. Lukscai thinks he’s secretly a homeless orphan, which is one out of two, I guess,”) and a few filthy comments about his forays into Manhattan’s clubbing scene (“It’s like no one’s ever seen a bisexual with an eight-pack before; he comes home and has to systematically delete like forty new numbers from his phone”), and then she excuses herself to pick at an unappetizing lunch in the hospital cafeteria.
She spends the second half of her trip reading Peter all of the headlines from the domestic and international sections of the Beacon Hills Daily Mirror and then the entirety of the arts section, which is four pages long. For the last three hours, she continues her annual tradition of reading from a book that she stole from the top of the stack on Derek’s bedside table. It changes every week; this time it’s Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.
Laura monitors Peter’s heartbeat out of habit more than anything else as she reads. Unsurprisingly, considering that it’s from Derek’s collection and that the title features the word ‘sadness’ in conjunction with ‘cake,’ the book is a mess of feelings and Laura’s voice begins to die halfway through, as the third hour draws to a close. Over what Laura personally feels are the worst parts, the ones that crush whole parts of her, Peter’s heart runs smooth.
As she starts to leave, it jerks almost imperceptibly. The monitors show no sign of it, but Laura can hear it, clear and shocking, a marked stumble in an even, loping stride. “Uncle Peter?” she whispers, and she begins to sit back down.
Like brutally unsympathetic magic, the nurse appears in the doorway. “Visiting hours are over,” she says waspishly.
“No, I know,” Laura says automatically, mouth moving even as her hands reach out for Peter’s, propped in his lap. “Give me a minute, please.”
“If you want more time,” the nurse replies, “you should consider coming more frequently.”
“Peter,” Laura whispers, but he gives no sign of having heard her; his heart and breathing are achingly steady. They’re a pointed contrast to Laura’s frantic pounding. “Can you hear me?” she adds a second later.
Peter does nothing.
“You need to leave,” the nurse says. She sounds as if she’s pretending to be sympathetic but can’t quite manage the charade.
“I know,” Laura says. “Shit-I mean, yeah.” She drops her hands from where they are hovering in front of Peter, braced as though she’s feeling for his aura or some other kind of metaphysical bullshit.
As if to ensure that Laura won’t sneak back inside, the nurse tails Laura all the way to the exit. “Have a nice night,” she says pointedly, and turns on a sharp heel to return inside. Laura wonders abstractly why she’s still working, eight hours later, when it had been obvious from her clothes that she’d come out of the night shift that morning. Then she feels a small stab of guilt about conditions that make it so that her uncle’s nurse has to pick up double shifts. A kid at home? A husband who’s been laid off?
Laura and Derek seem incredibly lucky in comparison, if you forget that they got their ridiculously Bruce Waynian amount of money because everyone in their family was murdered by Derek’s first serious girlfriend.
At five in the evening, Beacon Hills’ shoddy nightlife is just coming into its own. There are two new restaurants since the last time Laura was in town, both on the main street, and she debates between them before deciding, like she does every time she’s in town, that the emotional wreckage is not worth the trade-off of good food; she picks up Taco Bell on her way to the Preserve.
Laura eats the Taco Bell on the lawn outside of the house, facing into the forest, pretending that she can’t map a happy family memory onto every inch of overgrown lawn, like she can’t smell the brokenness of the house under the acrid sharpness of her tacos. The trick takes most of Laura’s considerable powers of self-deceit and then she can’t do it any more; she looks.
The top floor, where Natalie and Erin had shared a room, is gone completely. More ceiling tiles have fallen into the kitchen since the last time Laura was at the house, a year ago. She can count the number of beams that have shifted, the splinters that have disintegrated, and the animals that have moved in.
“Hi,” Laura finally says. She can hear where a family of voles has built a burrow underneath the driveway; they sound happy for voles, nested down in grasses. If she listens, silent and frozen in place, she can hear the squirrels running up trees and owls shaking out their wings and weasels sneaking through the undergrowth.
The house is a black hole; nothing comes from inside it, even though Laura knows that an extensive mouse family has colonized it. It even seems to suck in the light from the fading sun and reflect nothing in return. She imagines it does something poetic and picturesque like that to her, but she’s locked away the part of her that the house can hurt, and now it’s just a wreck of a piece of property. She’s fairly certain that she and Derek are in violation of about three kazillion zoning laws by keeping it standing.
“I miss you,” Laura says, and immediately feels like an idiot. The words are dwarfed by the noise of the forest, the persistent buzzing of life that comes from having millions of creatures crawling over one another inside the Preserve. Surrounded by so many reminders of goddamn Lion King circle of life bullshit, she feels awkward and out of place and mostly like a heroine in a shitty independent drama. If this were a movie, Laura could guarantee that Derek would be watching with his critically engaged eyebrows locked low over his eyes, taking in every film school nuance of the scene.
“Shit,” Laura mumbles under her breath.
It’s still true, of course. She misses them, beyond the placating bullshit of a Hallmark card’s worth of sentiment: Laura aches for her family, her heart burns in her chest and the ash suffocates her lungs. Maybe this is how humans feel, after they get the bite: a large chunk of Laura has vanished, and in its place is a sharp, clawing agony.
“This,” Laura says to no one, “is why I rarely visit this fucking house. I’m turning into Derek. Fuck.”
The moment that Laura realizes this scene can be reasonable construed as her talking to the Camaro, she gives up trying to heal herself through forced witnessing of her childhood home crumble before her eyes. She folds the collar of her jacket up so that it rests against the back of her neck and then she stuffs her hands into the pockets and sets off into the woods. She could shift and do this faster as a wolf, but she enjoys the crunch of the leaves under her hiking boots; she likes kicking the dirt and watching it fall with human eyes.
Her territory ends three miles south of the house, where the tree line falls away from the river. Laura presses her back against three of the largest trees and sits for a few minutes, letting her scent soak into the wood. She could pee on them, which is what her dad had done, but Laura’s human is at the forefront, enthralled by the pretty picture that the moon makes as it pushes above the trees and catches on the river, and Laura’s human doesn’t pee on trees.
Absently watching the play of the light, Laura plucks her hair out of its braid and then rubs her head against the tree, letting the bark catch on her hair and pull some of it out. She thinks about combing the bits of tree out after she’s finished, but she’s just going to have to repeat the process in two miles when she reaches the fringe of Hale land towards Susanville and it’s not like there’s anyone likely to go Clinton Kelly on her about her style choices.
Because she’s in a What Not to Wear frame of reference, it takes Laura a few seconds to peel herself out when she sees the flash of blue-grey out of the corner of her eye. The scent hits her seconds later; he’s downwind, clever of him, and Laura’s first, incredibly illogical thought is, Fuck, of all the people who could give me shit about the goddamn hair.
“Holy fuck,” is the first thing she says, as Peter spins and launches towards her, fangs distended from his jaw, face long and narrow like something out of a Tim Burton film. He’s incredibly fast, before even taking into account the six years he’s spent as a vegetable in Beacon Hills Memorial, and the Alpha senses take over without any conscious input from Laura’s reflexes. One second, Laura is facing down her uncle, his fingers distended into angry claws, and the next she’s on top of him, knee in his lower back, claws gripped around his throat as she arches his back and forces him into the curve.
“Hello, Laura,” Peter says, as if Laura has come by the house in Lookingglass for tea.
“What the fuck,” Laura spits out in a half-growl, tightening her fingers around his throat. She leans over and presses her nose into the angled curve of his jaw, directly behind his ear. He smells like hospitals and death and slick, new skin but his wolf is still wrong. “Peter?”
“I would think that was obvious,” Peter observes, his heart a metronome under Laura’s fingertips.
“Obvious, he says,” Laura says, the lightness of impending hysteria battling against the lower, threatening chords of her wolf’s voice. “Yes, obvious. My comatose uncle wandering around the woods, obvious.”
“Don’t be hysterical,” Peter says sharply, and his voice is so familiar, the whip-like strength of it, against the unfamiliar backdrop of his new wolf.
“Why are you different,” Laura asks in a flat voice. There’s this conflicted buzzing under her main thought process, a difficult-to-ignore Peter woke up why did he wake up. She wants to think we’re three now but Peter still isn’t pack.
“You’re a smart girl, Laura,” Peter says, speaking calmly into the top layer of dead leaves. “What do you smell?”
He says this in the intense way he’d always asked questions, during the afternoons that he came over to speak with her father and then ended up with Laura and Natalie and Erin in the living room, commandeering their scent memory games and teaching them how to disguise their mark from other wolves.
The old need to be right and to please, a need that Laura hasn’t felt since she sat numbly on the hood of her mother’s car with Derek pressed shaking into her side as Sheriff Wallace and the rest of the Beacon County police department combed over the smoldering wreck of her childhood, tells Laura to offer her answer slowly, to make sure that she’s saying what he wants.
And then Laura realizes, fuck what he wants, she’s his goddamn Alpha. “You’re not pack anymore,” Laura says, sounding more confident than she really feels. “I heard your heart stop, the night of the fire. A wolf’s heart never stops.” It’s like Laura’s thesis advisor is urging her on to the natural conclusion. What do we take away from all of this? “Ergo. New wolf.”
“Brava,” Peter says quietly, with palpable good grace and his odd, biting humor.
“Why the healing delay?” Laura asks. “Oh god, scratch that, why everything?” She presses more of her weight onto her knee, fighting down the urge to let him go.
“Am I going to be allowed to answer without a mouthful of dead leaves?” Peter asks politely.
“No,” Laura growls, “because you just attacked me.”
“I’m still unfamiliar with this new consciousness, Laura,” Peter explains steadily. “I didn’t know who you were.”
His heartbeat doesn’t tag it as a lie; Laura’s native paranoia battles the part of her that is shrieking HE’S AWAKE and the little girl that wants Uncle Peter to take over control of this mess of a situation and figure out a solution. Next year, the seven-year grace period will be up and the Hale territory will be threatened unless Laura can rebuild a pack; Derek is still too broken to even really think about Beacon Hills, let alone coming back; Laura still dreams about Chris some times, and she wakes up slick and furious and helpless in the face of his scent sinking into her skin.
Slowly, for a wolf, Laura rises to her feet and lets Peter stand. “So?” she demands aggressively, keeping her knees loose enough that-well, just in case.
Peter shrugs, elegant and slow, and adjusts the blue terrycloth hospital robe at his wrists. Laura hasn't spent enough time with him since the fire to allow the burns to become familiar; they stand out, like streaks of milk along the side of his face. She thinks of the house in Lookingglass and Miles’ toys scattered on the floor, Joanna’s handwriting on the calendar taped to their fridge.
“Things aren’t right,” Peter finally says, his posture loose and casual. Nothing about him indicates that anything is amiss, but there’s an old tilt to his head that sends short, shivery pulses down Laura’s back. Her wolf whines somewhere deep in her throat. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you’ve left a lot of loose ends walking around on borrowed time, Laura.”
“Don’t be cliché, Peter,” Laura snips.
“Don’t be lazy,” Peter admonishes right back; he’s better at it. “Emotional vulnerability is all well and good in a girl with your classical bone structure, but you’re only supposed to seem weak.”
Laura rocks back on her heels and huffs, offended. “Right, because the guy who spent the last six years in a coma is clearly qualified to discuss the decisions his Alpha made while he was a vegetable.”
“You’re not my Alpha,” Peter points out, and the silky quality of his voice has her wolf thinking, Fuck.
“Yes, semantics are clearly important right now,” Laura says dismissively. She can feel herself scrambling to return them to some kind of equilibrium. Peter’s presence is pulling out parts of her that haven’t seen the sun in years; she doesn’t even know what she wants, just that there’s a sticky ache in her chest and the back of her eyes and the base of her nose. “But if it’s that much of a concern for you, we can do it now.” She lets her eyes fill with bloody color. “The full moon is a week and a half away; plenty strong.”
Peter frowns and then sighs, theatrically, and tosses his head. “Let’s focus on the important matters at hand. The Argent girl, for example, and her merry band of helpers.”
Laura laughs helplessly; it’s not a pleasant sound. “Kate isn’t important, Peter. Derek is important. Pack is important.”
“What pack?” Peter asks with a derisive eyebrow lift. “You haven’t been biting anyone, have you?”
It’s always been amazing to Laura how quickly Peter is able to get under someone’s skin. He basically exists to define the term little shit. “No,” she says, remarkably steady considering that her wolf wants to pin Peter to the ground again. “It’s just Derek and I.” Saying ‘just’ feels like a betrayal of how hard Laura has worked to keep herself and Derek alive.
Peter tsks. “You weren’t prepared to be Alpha.”
“No shit,” Laura snarls. “I thought it was going to be Natalie or Erin after Dad, or maybe Michael. No one ever thought I would be Alpha. But I am your fucking Alpha and my only goal is to keep my brother and my pack alive.”
“Oh yes,” Peter agrees, “his trauma really must be something to behold. All of that guilt churning his insides.” Queerly focused on Laura-on her neck-he asks, “Does he have dreams, Laura? About us inside of the house with his lady friend laughing herself sick outside?”
Laura’s tongue feels swollen against the roof of her mouth. “I don’t know,” she admits after a long pause. She doesn’t dream at all; she’s never thought to ask Derek about it.
“I would,” Peter says musingly. “They would haunt me.”
To Laura’s nose, Peter smells overwhelmingly like the hospital and his strange blond nurse. It’s a peculiarly herbaceous scent; Laura’s nose wrinkles as he shifts from one foot to the other and she’s hit with a wave of it. “As wonderful as it is to have your highly qualified opinion of Derek’s mental status,” Laura says, relishing in the bitchiness, “I want to return your attention to the pertinent question on the table of why?”
Peter tilts his head to the left. “Laura, dear,” he says. “That’s far more complex than you would think.”
Laura spreads her hands to show that they’re surrounded by hundreds of acres of federally protected forest. “It’s not like we don’t have time, Uncle Peter,” she points out.
“Well, you might,” Peter says. “But I’m on a bit of a tight schedule.”
~
Peter presses his fingers to her forehead, gently pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Fuck you,” Laura gasps. The words rattle wetly through her chest. “Seriously, fuck you. I hope Derek rips your spine out.” She lacks the strength to make the words any stronger than a forceful whisper. Her healing factor is working steadily, sluggishly plugging along, but Laura already smells death on herself in thick, cloying waves.
“I imagine he will,” Peter admits.
There are a lot of things Laura wants to say: pithy things about Peter being as crazy as a box of frogs and sentimental things about her dead family and sad things about Derek, who really will be alone and have a legitimate reason to brood and there won’t be anyone to tease him out of his moods-and other, unexpected feelings, ones about Chris Argent that aren’t directly related to homicide or sex-but death doesn’t exactly pride itself on waiting around for you to finish your shit.
“F-fuck,” Laura wheezes on an inhale, desperately praying, I hope Derek finds the key to the storage container in Eureka, and then the last of the flat, tar scent of death rolls over her head;
and that’s it.