breathe in [part ii]
[part i]
~
They’d called this land-Beacon Hills, America, whatever you want to term it-the Land Without Magic, or so the lore had said. Lydia already knows that to be untrue, if simply because she took a handful of mountain ash when she was sixteen and raised a werewolf from the dead, but magic is different here.
Deaton isn’t so crass as to come out directly and ask about it, but Lydia arrives at the veterinary clinic at 5:30 on Monday afternoon while he and Ms. Morell are sitting in the waiting room, drinking tea, and when Lydia walks through the front door Morell drops her mug. Lydia stops it without even really considering the consequences; it’s been a long day, between Caleb Michaels’ stupidity and the way that Olive Witherspoon had been flicking increasingly interested looks at Boyd over her school copy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf during lunch and Lydia is tired.
“That’s a neat trick,” Deaton says, plucking the mug out of the air wherein it is suspended, a foot above the ground.
“It is,” Lydia agrees. On the one hand, the slip was ill-advised, but on the other, she’s fairly certain Deaton and Morell are talented enough to pick up the changes that have gone on in the way that magic is distributed around Lydia’s body. Just because things are different doesn’t meant Guinevere’s skills are any less profound, especially not with Lydia’s training to back up her own natural capacity. When neither Deaton nor Ms. Morell show any sign of getting up, she asks, “Are we going to begin, or just sit around and stare at each other? There are other places I can be if that’s the case.”
Morell’s hands are trembling slightly, but she retrieves her tea from Deaton and says, “Don’t be petulant, Lydia. Take a seat.”
Lydia wants to relax in one of Deaton’s shitty waiting room chairs like she wants to have back problems in her thirties, but she slips her bag off of her shoulder and places it on the floor as she sits. There’s no harm in cultivating an aura of reason, if not helpfulness. She probably doesn’t need Deaton and Morell’s lessons anymore, but since experimenting with her magic today has been low on her to-do list, which has prominently featured Don’t collapse in the middle of the hallway at school and Don’t stab Olive Witherspoon as its main line items, she can’t be sure.
Lydia’s magic, before she remembered Camelot, had been small and useful and green, like a field of corn. Everything underneath her fingertips had glinted with potential and she’d slowly coaxed the stalks to ripeness under Deaton and Morell’s (blackmailed, but Lydia has never pretended to be above fighting dirty) guidance and occasional disdain. Guinevere had been an accomplished sorceress by the time of her death, the unfortunate result of spending the last ten years of her life as basically useless, and now Lydia’s magic has exploded like hothouse flowers. Because magic in Beacon Hills is so strongly tied to the land, Lydia feels it in the air as she breathes and the earth as she walks.
“Why don’t we just have a talk today?” Deaton says. “You mentioned last week that you were translating a new text for Stiles’ library. Would you like tea, Lydia?”
The air in the veterinary is cold and slightly recycled, in deference to all of the animal dander. Lydia strips off her jacket with studied casualness and says, “Yes, thank you,” as she adjusts the cuffs on her silk blouse. When she briefly presses her lips together, she can feel the slightly gummy tack of her lipstick. The physical reminders tether her to Lydia Martin, who dresses to kill and doesn’t give any fucks, and remove her from Guinevere’s uncertainty.
And, always, her magic hums under her skin: a buoy and a guide and a heart, beating with the pulse of the land. Lydia makes a mental note to have another talk with Derek about the rabbit population; it’s more problematic than she had originally presumed, back when she’d been basing it on insufficient sampling.
“Why don’t you tell us about this text?” Deaton suggests. Morell purses her lips and still hasn’t moved her eyes away from Lydia, her uncomfortable counselor stare pinned to Lydia’s forehead. It would almost make Lydia uncomfortable, except Lydia knows she’s impeccably put together and she refuses to find Morell’s psychology degree intimidating. Psychology is an imprecise social science with delusions of practicality.
As a spoon clinks against a ceramic cup in the canteen behind the welcome desk, Lydia crosses her left leg over her right and flicks her hair over her left shoulder. “At the moment there’s not much to report,” she says, raising and lowering one shoulder in a more elegant version of her father’s favorite insouciant shrug. “Stiles originally asked me to examine it in order to determine the likelihood of us suffering another situation with an incubus, but it isn’t about sex magic at all. Much to Stiles’ disappointment, I’m sure.” She accepts the cup as Deaton offers it, careful to actually touch the side of the mug and not float it into her hands.
The leaves swirling in the bottom of the mug tell her a particular story: valerian root to soothe her troubles and leave her more open to conversation, passiflora vine for emotional balance, and meadowsweet as the base, for flavor and as a stress-reliever. “I don’t have a headache,” she tells Deaton, since as far as she knows this tea is meant to reduce the symptoms of one.
“Consider it a preventative measure,” Deaton replies.
When she inhales the sweet steam rising off of the surface of the tea, it drifts inwards and tickles her nose. Meadowsweet reminds her of home and the spring-she can remember brewing mead for the summer solstice with the other ladies of the keep. She always collected the honey; the bees would never bother her much.
“Thank you,” she remembers to add, after her first sip.
Deaton gives her as much of a smile as he ever does and Morell’s mouth tightens in the corners. “If it’s not sex magic,” she says, drumming her purple fingernails against the ceramic of her mug with a series of small tinkling noises, “then what is it?”
“It looks most like an analysis of a compulsion spell of some kind.” Lydia drinks more of the tea, rolling it over her tongue, and then she launches into a technical explanation of what she’s read so far. Deaton and Morell are a satisfying audience. They’re smart enough to follow along but, unlike Stiles, don’t feel the compulsion to interrupt every other sentence. Maybe eventually Stiles will reach the point where he no longer needs to prove his worth to the pack via his intelligence, but that day is unlikely to occur within the next eighteen months, by Lydia’s estimation.
Morell flicks her eyes into a roll. “Alan, this town will never cease to be ridiculous,” she murmurs. “Please note that I’m not disputing the likelihood of a compulsion spell of that caliber coming into play, but Beacon Hills’ ability to attract the supernatural will never fail to astonish me.”
She drawls this last bit; Lydia gets the heavy-handed irony, that Morell is never astonished by anything. Since Lydia still doesn’t like Morell overmuch, she ignores the interjection. “The reason why Stiles must’ve found it in his research on incubi is probably that it’s been found before in towns where witches have used it to simulate an incubi infestation.”
Because the conversation is rooted mostly in the hypothetical, it drifts eventually from incubi and compulsion spells to hemlock dosing, and from there to a heated-as heated as Deaton ever gets, really, which is not much-debate concerning consent in ritual exorcisms. It’s the way that they treat her in this discussion, as less of a student and more of a teaching assistant, that tells Lydia that they have tactfully acknowledged that there isn’t much else for them to teach her in a practicum environment and as such the tenor of the lessons will be shifting in the future.
“Why don’t you come back on Monday,” Deaton offers as he holds the door for her to leave. Lydia finishes securing the last button on her jacket and briefly tugs at the fringe along the edge of her scarf-a tasteful amount; Allison should take note-and nods.
“Once a week from now on is fine for me,” she says. “Have a nice evening, Dr. Deaton, Ms. Morell.”
She can feel Morell’s eyes against her as she walks to her car and Morell’s suspicion in the way that the lights in the veterinary clinic flicker off when the engine turns over and she reverses out of her parking space. Her curiosity about the sudden surge in reincarnation in Beacon Hills is manageable, so she feels no need to outsource to Deaton or Morell. Why she remembers, why Boyd remembers, why her magic has changed: Lydia wants to know, of course, because she wants to know everything, but she isn’t burning inside out with curiosity. The external factor of her magical ability proves that this isn’t a case of someone messing around in their heads, at least, so she doesn’t need to worry about that.
Her mother is on a conference call when Lydia comes home and to judge by the sharp, furious note that cuts out from under the door to her study, she won’t be interested in dinner for another few hours. Lydia accordingly tosses together a salad and retires for her desk with it and a glass of lemonade, intent on hammering out the last details of the translation for Stiles.
She finds herself, two hours later, dipping the tip of her mechanical pencil into the half-empty glass of lemonade, eyes slightly glazed over, using the pale liquid to trace runes into the air. The translation hasn’t even been touched; she’s eaten maybe three leaves of spinach.
The runes burn out in the air in front of her. They shine like trapped, trembling sunlight, and they beg for something that Lydia isn’t prepared to give: resolution for that peculiar precipice on which Guinevere had teetered for so many years. She’d been a good, strong queen and a strong woman who’d maybe not been quite so good. She had loved her husband for many years and then, when he’d left her barren bed and gone to find his son elsewhere, she’d stayed faithful to him regardless of the desire in her heart.
Lydia despises Guinevere for that. What’s the point of being selfless, if you end up in the situation where Guinevere had found herself-childless at thirty-five, essentially isolated from her husband and the rest of her court, deserted by her champion and her friends? Lydia had done a book report on Katherine of Aragon in the fourth grade and she’d been filled with revulsion for her steady, plodding nature, for the way that she’d clung to her ideals instead of moving on with the times and using her position to win something more meaningful for her and her daughter.
Guinevere had been a powerful sorceress, the kind of sorceress rivaled only perhaps by Merlin and Morgana in all of Camelot, and although she’d fallen to Morgana’s infertility potion and Merlin had seduced her husband away, she’d still been better than everyone else. But she’d never used any of it.
“What’s the point?” Lydia asks, aloud, to her empty bedroom and the runes written in front of her. “Having it and not using it is stupid.”
Guinevere hadn’t even been particularly wise. Guinevere had been a victim, primarily. She’d met other queens of other lands-Snow, from the Enchanted Forest, and Regina from the Dark Lands, and even Ariel from her little island and Penelope, whose daughter had been dropped into a deep sleep on the eve of her engagement-and always Guinevere had sunk back into the shade thrown by their vibrancy and purpose.
Pathetic, Lydia thinks, the word burning deep into her skin and further, into the wrinkled, membranous flesh of her stomach and intestines and heart and lungs. She opens her hand, letting the pencil fall, and splays her fingers so that the lemonade runes can sink into the meat of her palm. They’re meaningless jumbles, for strength and protection and mental acuity-things Lydia has in spades-but they still buzz under her skin and set off synapses in her head.
Lydia will allow nothing to jeopardize the years’ worth of effort she has put into building Lydia Martin, mathematical wunderkind and couture connoisseur. There is purity of purpose in Lydia that she refuses to sacrifice, even to Guinevere’s sensitive, high-strung demands of emotional comfort and the gentleness of Lancelot’s hands as he’d helped her from her horse and carried her basket of cuttings to the storeroom and swung her through a jig during the Yule feast. Lydia Martin is no longer Guinevere, Queen of the Summer Country; there’s no reason for her to assume that Vernon Boyd is still Lancelot.
~
Unlike everyone else Lydia knows, Derek parks outside of her house and leans on the horn rather than coming up to the front door. Lydia recognizes that his family all burned to death and it was very heartbreaking and difficult for him and many a violin played Mendelsohn tragically in the background while he cried bloody tears, but he wasn’t raised in a barn. Lydia remembers Mrs. Hale, who’d been the children’s librarian at Beacon Hills Public Library, like she remembers everything else-perfectly-and Mrs. Hale had not been the kind of woman who tolerated poor manners in her children.
As such, Lydia finishes applying a second layer of top coat as Derek sounds the Camaro’s horn again, and then she changes her Facebook status, checks her eyeliner for irregularity, and gives the irises that her mom has in a crystal vase over the fireplace a little extra va-va-voom; Lydia has never liked dying flowers. Peter Hale had been especially fond of metaphors during his tenure in Lydia’s head, and if she never has to hear someone waxing lyrically about a waning orchid it will be too soon.
Eventually, her phone rings; it’s Derek, of course. He’s the only one other than Deaton who likes to pretend that text messaging doesn’t exist.
“Hello?” Lydia answers, checking her nail polish for chips or stray hairs.
“Get your ass in the car, Martin,” Derek growls.
Lydia blows on her left pinkie and gently nudges a piece of lint out of the danger zone with her thumb. “What do we say?” she asks in a sweet, singsong tone.
“Get out here before I rip your throat out with my teeth,” Derek says, parroting her sweet voice. He sounds like a chain-smoking Southern belle; Lydia can imagine that there’s a story there, but, unlike Stiles, she isn’t obsessed with discerning every nuance of Derek Hale’s tragic backstory.
“Nice try,” Lydia says, “but I’m not Stilinski.” She hangs up.
Two minutes later, her doorbell rings. Lydia’s been sitting on the living room couch for the past minute and thirty seconds, composing the email she always sends her grandmother on the first of the month; she saves her careful examination of MIT and Caltech’s respective math departments and goes to answer the door.
The look on Derek’s face could melt iron, but Lydia’s made of sterner stuff. “Hello, Derek,” she says breezily, elbowing him out of the way so she can step out onto her porch. “Thanks for giving me a ride.”
“Is that really how this is going?” Derek demands, flashing her a bit of side-fang in the afternoon sunlight. “Thanks for the ride?”
“I was showing you how people with manners respond in normal situations,” Lydia replies, yanking the door shut and slamming her key into the front lock. “I realize ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are generally foreign concepts to people who live in subway cars, but that’s why I’ve taken it upon myself to educate you. Without manners you might as well go back to living in the woods with fur.”
Derek reaches out and mimes strangling her. “Believe it or not, this disaster will not postpone itself because you’re playing Miss Manners, Lydia.”
“I thought you and the other wolves killed all of the red caps, Derek,” Lydia says. “If this does qualify as a disaster, whose fault would that be, exactly?”
“Probably the girl who almost drowned,” Derek says tightly. He puts his hand against the back of her head and shoves her towards his car; he really must be concerned, because Derek rarely shows physical imposition against anyone except Stiles nowadays. “Get in the goddamn car, Lydia.”
“Pushy,” Lydia remarks. “There must be another cluster of them in the preserve, then.”
All Derek does is twitch as he crosses in front of his car; it means she’s right but he doesn’t want to lose whatever tenuous hold he currently has over the situation. Derek’s leadership issues are adorable, and by adorable Lydia means excessively annoying. She’s toyed with signing him up for some kind of leadership camp experience for this summer-something for him to do while the rest of the pack deals with orientation and buying desk lamps and other pre-college things-but she imagines that he’d just spend it unproductively, lurking in dark corners and texting Stiles.
Stiles is the only person Derek will text. It’s another thing that Lydia finds irritating.
“We won’t be able to hunt them until sundown,” she reminds Derek once he’s joined her inside his car and turned it on with an overwhelming roar. Even though Lydia has read plenty of classic Freud and knows enough to make fun of the Psychology Today links that show up on her newsfeed, it would take a team of crack psychologists with a lot of NSF funding to delve into the full depths of what the Camaro represents in the domain of Derek’s shattered psyche.
“We’re doing this new thing,” Derek says, grinding into a gear that somehow enables him to go even faster, “where we plan before we venture out into dangerous situations.”
“Oh, are we?” Lydia replies with a raised eyebrow. She’s trying a new thing where she’s pretending that Derek driving his car like a NASCAR reject doesn’t make the skin want to peel off of her fingers. “That’s exciting.”
“Hopefully not too exciting,” Derek says drily. “The goal is to cut back on excitement.”
“Please, stop with the euphemisms,” Lydia says, waving a hand at him. “Your uncle had a fondness for them and I still have lingering trauma related to that.”
Derek mutters something about how they all have lingering trauma thanks to Peter, and now that Lydia has officially ventured deep enough into emotional vulnerability to fill her daily quota for Ms. Morell, she decides to take them back out. “As touching as this bonding moment has been, I’d much rather talk about the red caps. Presumably a plan is in development that doesn’t involve essentially cornering them in the middle of their territory and hoping no one drowns?”
Now that he’s been given the okay to be a shithead, Derek blazes forth with all engines roaring. He and Lydia bicker for the entire drive back to pack headquarters, which is the Stilinski residence this week while the sheriff is out of town at a state-mandated conference. Just to be an asshole, Derek starts in on Sun Tzu halfway through their conversation, and Lydia obviously can’t let that stand. It’s like waving an evolutionary psychology study with a sample size of N=10 in front of her face and expecting her not to rip it to shreds.
They haven’t progressed to full-out yelling-Lydia Martin is never anything but flawlessly classy-but Derek is definitely growling more than he is enunciating his vowels by the time he brakes in the sheriff’s cruiser’s usual parking space and he and Lydia pour out onto the Stilinski’s front lawn, Lydia openly baiting Derek about his stereotypical preferences in military science literature.
“It’s nice that you think a few quotes from the Art of War are going to cure our difficulties, but the red caps are not human,” Lydia points out, jabbing an index finger towards Derek’s chest. “Ascribing human motives to them would be foolhardy and short-sighted and I thought the whole point of reevaluating our plan of attack was to reduce the amount of incurred risk.”
“Okay, time out,” Stiles says, stepping onto the porch and throwing a hand out in either direction.
“Shut up, Stiles,” Derek and Lydia both growl.
“No, seriously, my house and my rules. Table the debate on ancient Chinese military tactics and put on your big boy pants.”
“Over my dead body are we using Sun Tzu to mandate our plan of attack against the red caps. In the first place, it’s intellectually immature.” Lydia makes sure to smack Derek in the chest with her purse as she steps past him. He’s basically incapable of disobeying Stiles, which is a trait Lydia doesn’t share and of which she is perfectly willing to take advantage. “Secondly, red caps aren’t human and therefore human war strategy won’t work on them. It’s cute that you think it will, but it won’t.” She smiles at Stiles, and it isn’t a pleasant expression. “No need to play Mom, I’m done.”
When she breezes past Stiles into his living room, most of the pack is arrayed on various pieces of furniture, draped like Annie Leibovitz is going to show up to shoot the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair at any second. All that’s missing is the couture, really, and while Lydia had made a pact with herself very early on not to have any feelings about Jackson moving away, whether they be positive or negative, she misses knowing at least one other person at pack meetings could be guaranteed to have touched something by Chanel in their lifetime.
Boyd is in the far corner, looming above the only open armchair, his face inscrutable and distant. Now is not the time for Guinevere to be having inconvenient feelings all over Lydia’s carefully-maintained aura of perfect composure; to prove it, Lydia walks through the sea of Beta limbs thrown across the Stilinskis’ living room floor and settles delicately into the open armchair. Her skin feels scattered pricks of heat from where Boyd’s hand is resting against the left shoulder of the armchair.
“Hello, Lydia,” he says, deliberate and low.
“Hello, Boyd,” she says. Very few things ever choose to disobey Lydia Martin, but her voice cracks over the last consonant of his name. It would be imperceptible to human ears, but naturally Lydia is surrounded by supernatural creatures with excessively good hearing; Scott and Isaac’s heads swivel towards her in unison.
“Are you-” Isaac tries, and then he thinks better of it when Lydia gives him the chilly look that she had whetted against Stephanie Lin, who had cried every day of freshman year and is now probably a stronger person because of it.
“Yes?” Lydia asks sweetly. She nails Scott with her stare next, but he’s made of slightly more impervious stuff now that he’s buoyed by the force of Allison’s love or whatever other teenage drama nonsense floats through his brain instead of the material for their AP Physics class.
“Are you okay?” Scott asks, all well-meaning interest and sympathy, his big puppy eyes earnestly blinking in Lydia’s direction. She wants to take a firm grip on his Justin Bieber mess of a haircut and slam him face-first into the Stilinskis’ coffee table; even though she suppresses that particular urge, Scott still yelps a second later when his glass of soda burbles over the rim and splashes Coke all over his shirt and jeans. He carefully put the glass onto the coffee table and goes into the kitchen to clean himself off.
As she nestles back into the armchair, checking her cuticles with an air purposely meant to discourage conversation, she feels the heat of Boyd’s body and the strength of his presence as he leans over the back of the armchair and breathes into her ear, “That was unsubtle.”
“Well, thank God Scott’s thicker than Julia Russell’s thighs, then,” Lydia says, not bothering to whisper. Whispers perpetuate intimacy, and the last thing Lydia needs is to trick herself into a return to intimacy with Lancelot. She wonders sometimes, when she’s being very weak-willed and there’s no one around to witness it, if Lance found his true love after he left Camelot. He’d told her on his last night in the castle, with an involuntary grimace, that he was trapped by his love for her-one that she obviously couldn’t return, considering her husband and the kingdom and everything it represented-and he needed to leave Camelot to free himself before it killed him.
She respects his decision. It had nearly broken Guinevere into pieces at the time-Lancelot had been the last of her allies to stay in Camelot after Mordred had been born and it had become obvious that Guinevere wielded a fading power-but Lydia understands self-preservation in light of the state of affairs in Beacon Hills. Guinevere had been a parasite; Lancelot had made the best of a bad hand of cards by leaving.
Boyd laughs as he draws back, and his breath drifts in a gust of warmth across the exposed skin of her neck, ruffling the neckline of her sweater. Lydia can control her breathing and she can wrest her heartbeat into normalcy through sheer force of will, but she can’t do a thing to stop her magic from reacting. The new power from the return of her memories still sits uneasily under her skin as Lydia Martin; at the sudden reminder of a familiar presence, combined with the sheer unpredictability that always goes hand-in-hand with the first of May, the power simmers and snaps until her fingers tingle and the air around her crackles with the smell of ozone and ginger.
A fire snaps to life in the Stilinskis’ fireplace. Isaac makes a high-pitched squeak and flattens himself against the back of the couch. Erica makes the same noise but doesn’t move, which Lydia respects. From the doorway, Stiles, his hand resting against Derek’s back, says, “Way to be a show-off, Lydia,” and, like always, Lydia has no earthly idea what Boyd is thinking.
“Are we going to begin any time soon?” she asks, zeroing in on a stray fleck of nail polish on her left ring finger. “Some of us have things to do this weekend.”
She means studying for her AP Physics test on Monday-she gets in the habit of studying even if it’s unnecessary, like it is for physics, because it keeps her sharp and focused-but Erica rolls her eyes and says, “We’re all very sad that you’re missing Josh Grabowski’s party, but actually no fucks are given about your social life.”
“That’s so cute,” Lydia tells her. “The way that you pretend you have no interest in Josh’s party this weekend. Good for you.” Something about Erica rubs Lydia the wrong way; it’s definitely intentional on Erica’s part, and probably relates to her tragic backstory pre-bite, like most of the behavior deficiencies in the pack do, but Lydia only has so much room in her teeny tiny soul to wedge in caring for a few individuals. Stiles and Allison take up the majority of the real estate currently available.
“Meow,” Stiles says. “Um, if the cats could sheathe their claws? There is, in fact, something we need to talk about.”
“Try comparing me to a kitten one more time, Stiles,” Erica growls, “and we’ll see what happens.” She bares her teeth to Stiles, who rolls his eyes in an exaggerated imitation of Erica herself, and it’s enough to make Boyd and Isaac laugh and take down the tension in the room by a few degrees. The fire in the grate, which is sustaining itself without any fuel, flickers and calms into something a little less than a total blaze.
“Oh, cool,” Scott says coming back from the kitchen, his attention drawn by the change in light. “Thanks for whoever started that, it was getting pretty chilly in here and the Sheriff threatens to cut someone whenever the thermostat inches above 60.” As far as conversation shifts go, it’s not the most obvious one they’ve ever had to suffer through, so. Things move on.
The new plan is only slightly less stupid than the previous one, but at least it requires Lydia to stay home and scry rather than traipse through swamp muck in a new pair of shoes. Lydia realizes that Stiles has a burning desire to be recognized as an equally important member of their pack, despite his being human and lacking the ability to do impressive things with a crossbow, but Lydia’s self-esteem problems don’t extend far enough that she feels the need to put herself in constant physical danger. As Stiles aggressively campaigns to be included on the field trip, Lydia begins to write a shopping list on her phone for what she’s going to need from Deaton’s office and her own personal collection.
“Boyd, stay with Lydia,” Derek orders as Stiles grips the front of his shirt and begins to forcibly push him towards the stairs. He’s not going anywhere unless he wants to be, which makes his whole pretend-struggle just look ridiculous and juvenile; Stiles appears slightly less pissed off in the face of it, though, so maybe Derek isn’t a complete failure at his stupidly co-dependent, unhealthy relationship. “The rest of you, regroup at the house at sundown.”
As she leaves, Erica nails Lydia with an unhappy, threatening stare and Lydia returns a blank bitch-face that is, according to Stiles, nationally competitive. If Erica wants to make a scene and finally reveal why, exactly, she despises every word out of Lydia’s mouth, Lydia can block out time in her schedule for it. Lydia has very little patience for people who threaten without following through, though, which is why she stopped being scared of Derek very early in their relationship.
Eventually, Lydia and Boyd are left alone in the Stilinskis’ living room, with only the sound of Stiles shouting at Derek upstairs tinkling through the background. “What do you need?” Boyd asks finally. He has yet to come around from behind the armchair, but Lydia doesn’t have it in her to be uncomfortable with Boyd at her back. She has too many years of memories as Guinevere where having Lancelot at her back was just about the only protection she had against the forces that would’ve ripped her throne away.
“Ginseed oil and a new leather thong from Deaton-mine snapped during the thing with the ghouls-and my crystals and tapers from home.” Lydia scrolls down her list to the end, where she’s written rosemary again? “Maybe a stop at Raley’s.”
“Deaton’s first,” Boyd suggests. “Then Raley’s.”
Lydia’s a smart girl; she hears the hesitation in his voice, the way that he pauses and asks without words to be invited into her home. She’s hosted the occasional rotating pack meeting when her mother is out of town, but she hasn’t since her birthday and the sudden reemergence of her memories. The way that he asks is all Boyd. Lancelot had never been particularly great with the subtle sort of boundary.
She wonders, like she has at least seven times in the last two days, what happened in the childhood of Vernon Boyd to create a man so much more taciturn than Lancelot. He lives with his Aunt Heni in a neat clapboard house on the edge of town; his two jobs are to pay for the live-in nurse that takes care of Heni. She knows that his mother cleared out when he was thirteen; she knows that he puts black pepper on his macaroni and cheese.
Lydia has never heard him say any of this; she’s good with context clues, inferences, and extracting information from Stiles. In another world, she might be capable of opening her mouth and asking, without sounding like she has an ulterior motive, what it was like, to have parents who completely gave up on the pretense of caring about you, parents who stopped pretending that they were going to come back and just left altogether. This other Lydia might be able to ask him why he so obviously loves his Aunt Heni, even though the presence of the live-in nurse and some basic research into genealogy would reveal that she’s 95 and probably senile. How do you love someone who isn’t even really there?
Hypothetical questions are only fun when there’s the possibility of them actually being answered.
Lydia stands and pockets her phone. “Stiles might have rosemary. There’s no reason to go to Raley’s if that’s the case.” When Boyd doesn’t move, she waves her hand at him. “I’ll meet you in the car. Deaton’s, then home. If my mother asks-which she won’t-you’re my partner for that feudal infrastructure project in AP Econ.”
Boyd says, “I am your partner for the AP Econ feudal infrastructure project.”
“I finished that paper a month ago,” Lydia says dismissively, leaving him behind as she makes her way into the kitchen, where pots of herbs are lining the sill above the sink. There’s a small, struggling rosemary plant, fighting against an onslaught of lemonbalm, in the glazed blue pot furthest to the left. Lydia says a small prayer of thanks to the plant for its gift and then twists three stems off in quick succession, before wrapping them in a paper towel and tucking them into the pocket of her jacket.
The other two pots on the sill are green and yellow; the yellow one, on the right and closest to the fridge, is filled with wisteria that Lydia is having Stiles root for her. Before remembering Guinevere, setting down roots had always been the most difficult part of nature magic for Lydia. The original idea had been to plant vines around all of the entryways of her house; a guard in the future against shitheads like Peter Hale getting any stupid ideas.
Wisteria protects because it represents steadfastness. When Lydia reaches for one of the newly emerging petals, it unfurls, hot and velvet, across her finger. The whole kitchen scents of it, thick and heavy, and the plant grows-harder, faster, until the base of its pot cracks and the roots spill out over the sink, greedily sucking water from the lip of the washbasin. Lydia can’t see out the window anymore for the profusion of blooms, but still it grows. It’s so hungry. Steadiness needs some kind of foundation; devotion can’t actually be built on thin air, no matter what Scott thinks.
Sorry about the pot, Lydia writes on the notepad stuck to the fridge. She leaves it pinned to the mess of dirt and plant that’s erupted out of the windowsill and then she leaves the house, Stiles and Derek yelling at each other upstairs and the wisteria blossoms pressing against the glass of the kitchen window, for Boyd and his silent car.
~
As twilight falls into night, Lydia lights the candles around her scrying circle and rubs her palms together briskly, trying to stave off the inevitable symptoms of low circulation. Boyd is somewhere behind her, hovering in the shadows like Derek has started giving lurking lessons, but Lydia’s focus is entirely devoted to what is in front of her. She’d added the last of the water with an eyedropper, to ensure flawlessly level surface tension; the steel grey of the water reflects Lydia’s face back to her, her eyes huge in her pale face.
Lydia dislikes scrying for the same reason she dislikes psychology and string theory: it’s imprecise and inclined to fail when tested on a large enough sample size. But if Derek needs her to scry for the last surviving red caps and it’s the best plan out of the others offered by his Greek chorus of Betas, Lydia will scry for him.
At first, everything goes well-she chants directives under her breath as she swings the crystal in a clockwise motion above the surface of the bowl, letting the power of the crystal shiver across the water. After a while, the ripples begin to shape images, and these images distend themselves away from the bowl, taking on the shape of the bog, of Derek and Stiles and Scott, of Allison with a fierce, concentrated expression and her bow drawn.
Lydia narrates steadily to Boyd, who should be relaying the information on to Derek, and everything goes peachy until they finally reach the red caps and Lydia changes the direction of the crystal, intending to send the images back down to the water and break the connection, because her crystal stops moving.
“Shit,” Lydia breathes, and the crystal starts to melt against the water.
“What do you need?” Boyd asks. Lydia’s already begun her disaster response compartmentalization; the part of her brain that can deal with inanities respects that Boyd doesn’t flail or ask stupid questions about what’s happening. If Lydia knew what was going on, there wouldn’t be a problem.
“Break the circle,” Lydia tells him, unwinding the thong from around her hand and trying to keep her fingers from trembling. As long as the water doesn’t spill out of the bowl, things are still at a manageable level. “At the western point,” she adds a second later when she can’t see him moving. “Blow out the candle. Push the smoke out of the circle.”
“I have done this once or twice, Gwen,” he reminds her as he circles around to the western point. His brows are drawn low over his eyes with deep concentration.
Lydia hears his slip, but now is not the time for that conversation. There will likely never be a time for that conversation, although she has three contingencies in place for reasons why he might call her Gwen in public in front of other members of the pack; the third one isn’t Stiles-proof, but it’ll do well enough with the rest of the pack. “Magic was different in Camelot,” she bites out. She locks her biceps to prevent shaking; the liquid at the tip of the melting crystal is beginning to form a drop.
Boyd licks the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and positions his left behind the flame, inside of the circle. Lydia can feel the intrusion like a small pinch; it’s sort of how an needle feels going into skin treated with a local anesthetic, except that Lydia’s never been interested in needle-play and Boyd’s hand in her circle changes the flavor of things.
“Now, if you would,” Lydia snaps, and Boyd closes his thumb and forefinger over the flame, following immediately after with his left hand cupped to encourage the smoke out of the circle. Lydia feels the spell magic snap across the back of her hand and she lets go of the crystal, her arm hot from relieved tension. The crystal stays suspended for one second, and another, and then it falls into the water with a small splash, sending a wave of water over the rim of the bowl onto the floor.
“What was that?” Boyd asks.
“I don't know,” Lydia says tightly, before she can even think of something clever or pointed or distracting. When she splays her hands over the water and tries to feel for what might have caused the disturbance, she gets nothing. Even her scrying crystal, misshapen and solid again at the base of the bowl, has lost its aura.
“I’ll call Derek,” Boyd says. “Check up on everyone. You should sit down.”
Lydia nods, eyes closed, still shaping the outline of the scrying field above the water. “You do that,” she tells him, trying to tease out the edges of the field. There should be some kind of aftereffect, even if it’s just the hemispherical haze of the field itself, but Lydia’s magic pushes against nothing.
Lydia has always enjoyed practicing magic because, like math, it presents her with the opportunity to map a set of circumstances that might otherwise be left unexplainable. She likes how magic makes her feel, too; Lydia enjoys fields where she has to work at becoming the best but it’s still attainable. Too many things come to her easily for her to trust them with her full attention.
Still, Lydia hasn’t been unable to explain a magical phenomenon in a year and a half. With Guinevere’s thirty-plus years of experience hovering in the back of her head, there should be very little that is inexplicable to Lydia. No matter what Stiles says-and Stiles says a lot, most of it nonsense; smoke and mirrors meant to dissuade the listener from paying attention to him beyond superficial concerns-magic follows rules. Magic, unlike string theory, does not dissolve into a set of contradictory terms.
“Everything has a reason,” Lydia murmurs to herself, curling her fingers into claws and trying to draw up some kind of reading through sheer willpower.
She feels when Boyd returns; his physical presence always pushes at the edges of her consciousness. It shatters what little concentration she could pull together, and all it leaves behind is Lydia’s most hated feeling-gnawing, grasping emptiness and a need for knowledge. She’s not as bad as Stiles when it comes to some research, mainly because she doesn’t have self-control problems, but Lydia is very, very bad with puzzles she cannot solve.
“Are they all right?” she asks. She leaves her hands out and her eyes closed so that she has an excuse for ignoring him handy if she needs one.
“Nothing connected to what happened here. Some bumps, all healable. Derek said they finished off the last of the red caps and the swamp disappeared.”
“Yes, well, that took long enough,” Lydia says. Her hands, which have been steady through this entire process, begin to shiver. She tells herself that it’s exhaustion, and then an overuse of her power resources, and then she stops kidding herself and tags it as what it really is, which is the first time that she and Boyd have been alone and distraction-free in a room together since they remembered that Arthur is dead and her husband is therefore no longer any kind of impediment.
The pressure that’s been sitting on Lydia’s pelvic bone all day begins to simmer and rise. Does the room smell of wisteria or is that just her projecting? She normally has much better control over her physical senses. She normally has better control over everything, including herself, but the absence of extraneous magic in the room is making hers pulse stronger, and to judge by the way that Boyd takes a breath-overloud in the silence of the room, the beginning of a gasp at the end-he can smell it.
As if to give herself permission, Lydia tells herself very firmly, This will only be a bad idea if it happens more than once, and then she puts down her hands and opens her eyes. Boyd is stationed across from her, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his massive chest, his face inscrutable in the shadows left by the four remaining candles. She used to be able to read Lancelot so easily.
She wants to ask, Why don’t you laugh anymore? She wants to know about the years in between his acquaintance with her. She wants to know about what he did after he left Camelot, how he buried the ache that he used to carry in his eyes for her, whether he found something as strong and destructive as Merlin and Arthur had had between them, if he misses the queen that he served after he left her, the one with her beautiful husband and their shining, glossy castle.
It’s Beltane; if there’s ever a time where the earth demands a stupid kind of decision-making process, it’s now.
They meet less than halfway, four of Boyd’s steps to Lydia’s two, and he’s licked his way inside of her mouth before she has time to think about closing her eyes. She feels his eyelashes-they’re long, dark, and thin-against the bridge of her nose as he tilts her head to the left, his tongue curling over the ridge of her bottom teeth. He’s hot like Jackson had been, after the change, running at an average temperature ten degrees Fahrenheit hotter than Lydia’s normal human mean, and it means that Lydia knows exactly where his body is at all times in relation to hers.
Boyd is a biter, but it’s more symbolic than forceful-he nips at the heavy curve of her upper lip and then the corner of her mouth and out towards where she would have a dimple, if she was the kind of girl who had dimples, genetically speaking. He rubs his cheek against hers and the motion is faintly abrasive from end-of-the-day stubble but nothing that manages to convince Lydia that this is a bad idea.
Then, his mouth is on the lobe of her ear and then behind her ear, where she dabs perfume as part of her morning routine, and then down the line of her sternocleidomastoid muscle to the meat of her shoulder, the place where her collarbone melts into her neck, and his bite there is more aggressive before he follows immediately after with a hot, soothing kiss, his tongue pressing against the developing bruise.
There’s a high-pitched noise coming from the back of Lydia’s throat, dragged from her by the way that he tilts her head back with a single hand and stretches the muscle of her neck for his perusal. She wants to see more of him, and the candles flare in recognition of that, responding eagerly to Lydia’s wordless, stupid keening noise, the way that she scrambles to fix the height separation between them, hiking her skirt higher up her thighs so she can press against him.
Boyd’s skin reflects copper and burgundy against the flat shadows of the rest of the room; he visually blazes like he feels against her bare skin. She palms his shirt and tries to lift it over his head but she can’t, not while he’s worrying a line of skin down her shoulder with his teeth. “Clothing removal is not optional,” she tells him in a low rumble and he laughs, Lancelot’s laugh but different, less confident and more shell-shocked; it forces him to release her and she takes advantage of that to rip his shirt over his head.
One or both of them must knock the scrying bowl to the floor because Boyd lifts her with a hand under her ass, the other pressing in a hard, long stroke down her back, and he sets her down on the table where it had sat and there’s nothing to prevent Lydia from leaning back and whipping her sweater over her head. She doesn’t even think about her hair, or her eyeliner, or the various other things that she’s used to keep herself occupied during sex before-Lydia’s attention span is better than Stiles’ but not by much and especially not when its only distraction is a sixteen-year-old boy more interested in humping against her thigh than doing anything even remotely pleasurable-before she plasters herself against his front and sinks her fingernails into his scalp.
Lydia doesn’t even recognize all of the things she’s chanting under her breath; little cries and moans and the heat of the candles and Boyd’s skin and the warmth of the wooden table under her ass and it bleeds together with the sickening smell of wisteria blossoms, undercut by the bite of the rosemary. Boyd’s fingers finally stop fucking around and slip under the waistband of her tights, peeling the chiffon off of her sweaty skin and then slowly down her legs, because Boyd is patient and his eyes have turned golden and his fangs are pressing against his lower lip as all of his concentration focuses on the curl of her tights against the inside of her knee.
“Lydia,” he says, in a weird voice, lisping from his fangs, and then he thumbs the base of her throat and slants his mouth across hers and everything tastes metallic and drugging like velvet for a second before he releases his mouth to realign their lower bodies. His hand encircles her entire knee and he presses his fore- and middle finger against the back of her knee, tickling her until she can’t decide whether to laugh or to shiver helplessly. Lydia Martin never does helpless, even now, so instead she bites into the thick muscle of his left pectoral, hard enough to raise blood, hard enough to leave a fleeting mark in his impervious werewolf skin.
And then finally, finally, like Lydia hasn’t been waiting for him to touch her for the past twenty years, like they don’t have any history of staring at each other across crowded corridors or that stupid, reckless, first and final kiss, like their history is as clean as if they were and always had been nothing more than a pair of teenagers, he presses his thumb against her clit and completes some kind of circuit.
“Foreplay is nice,” Lydia tells him once she can see straight, “if you haven’t been doing it for years and I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing, but you’re not,” and she’s scrambling for the button closure to his jeans and he’s digging through his pockets for a condom and for a handful of seconds it’s just awkward teenage sex again, even if it’s awkward teenage sex in the middle of a scrying circle etched into Lydia’s mother’s morning parlor, and Lancelot and Guinevere and their aching romantic drama feels the furthest that they’ve ever been.
But then they’re not, because when they are finally together, Boyd sunk so deeply inside of Lydia that she’s sort of bonelessly draped over the table, every nerve in her body tingling with a resting potential that could short out the entirety of Beacon County’s electrical grid, the sharp edge of his pelvic bone resting, like a friendly hello, against the jut of Lydia’s own, all she can see behind her closed eyelids is Lancelot riding in the first tournament that he’d won with her favor, as queen’s champion, and the way that she’d wrapped her magic through the links in his chain mail and kept him close.
So, in a way, this is all Guinevere’s fault. From the first moment that she let herself be caught by her husband’s best boy-knight, she’d made all of this happen.
“Lydia,” Boyd murmurs against the still skin of her stomach, “I don’t make love to dead women.”
“Oh, you’re so romantic,” she flutters, pressing a palm to her sticky chest. “Do you say that to all the girls?”
He says, “There weren’t other girls, Gwen,” and somehow-God knows how he finds the space-he sinks in an inch deeper, slowly, as if he has all of the time in the world to finish tearing her into pieces.
“I'm not an idiot,” she says to the ceiling, trying to focus on the patterns left by the candles instead of the too many feelings sparking across her clit from the pressure he’s exerting against it. She doesn’t need placating lies; they’re boring.
“None meant this,” he says, and unlike the four or five times Lydia has heard this in the past, from boyfriends tired of trying to keep up with her insane demands and Arthur explaining why the hell his court sorceress has given birth to a child that is his splitting image, Boyd sounds solid and sure instead of desperate; he isn’t pleading with her. “It has been and will always be you.”
It’s the endorphins, Lydia thinks. She can draw the molecular structure of every chemical currently coursing through Boyd’s brain, convincing him that he’s in love; she can name them, both in alphabetical order and the order in which they occur in the signaling pathway. Instead of doing that, she traces the outline of a benzene ring against his forearm and says, “I’m not the same.”
“No,” he agrees, and this is apparently the only signal that he needs to decide that, in fact, moving would be a good idea; he slides out and then thrusts back in, and every inch of lubricated flesh feels the slide of warmth and friction and God damn it this is probably the worst time for them to be talking about this, so Lydia does what she does best and takes control of an otherwise disastrous situation. She sits up, sucks his tongue into her mouth, and bites down until his hips begin to stutter and his breathing stops altogether.
After Lydia’s come and he’s come and they’re both now half-naked, sprawled across a miraculously unbroken table, Lydia spits out her mouthful of blood and lazily unloops her legs around his hips. “My mother will probably be home soon,” she says. “I lost track of time but she’s usually back by eight.”
“It’s after ten,” Boyd mumbles into her shoulder. His breathing is still erratic and his skin is moving in little jerking shivers under her touch. “I can feel the moon.”
That’s a neat treat. “Great,” Lydia says. “You need to leave, then. My curfew is at eleven.”
Lydia doesn’t even feel bad about how much of a total lie that is-not only does Lydia not have a curfew, it wouldn’t be at eleven if she did-because it accomplishes what she needs it to, which is Boyd puts his shirt back on and leaves Lydia in the wreck of her scrying circle to have a very brief panic attack that in no way resembles one of Stiles’ infamous shitfests. Then, after she’s forced her heartbeat back into a normal range and cleaned up the wreck of the morning parlor, she puts on a pair of fleece pajamas and watches The Notebook in the living room with a bowl of microwaved kettle corn.
[part iii]
~
They’d called this land-Beacon Hills, America, whatever you want to term it-the Land Without Magic, or so the lore had said. Lydia already knows that to be untrue, if simply because she took a handful of mountain ash when she was sixteen and raised a werewolf from the dead, but magic is different here.
Deaton isn’t so crass as to come out directly and ask about it, but Lydia arrives at the veterinary clinic at 5:30 on Monday afternoon while he and Ms. Morell are sitting in the waiting room, drinking tea, and when Lydia walks through the front door Morell drops her mug. Lydia stops it without even really considering the consequences; it’s been a long day, between Caleb Michaels’ stupidity and the way that Olive Witherspoon had been flicking increasingly interested looks at Boyd over her school copy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf during lunch and Lydia is tired.
“That’s a neat trick,” Deaton says, plucking the mug out of the air wherein it is suspended, a foot above the ground.
“It is,” Lydia agrees. On the one hand, the slip was ill-advised, but on the other, she’s fairly certain Deaton and Morell are talented enough to pick up the changes that have gone on in the way that magic is distributed around Lydia’s body. Just because things are different doesn’t meant Guinevere’s skills are any less profound, especially not with Lydia’s training to back up her own natural capacity. When neither Deaton nor Ms. Morell show any sign of getting up, she asks, “Are we going to begin, or just sit around and stare at each other? There are other places I can be if that’s the case.”
Morell’s hands are trembling slightly, but she retrieves her tea from Deaton and says, “Don’t be petulant, Lydia. Take a seat.”
Lydia wants to relax in one of Deaton’s shitty waiting room chairs like she wants to have back problems in her thirties, but she slips her bag off of her shoulder and places it on the floor as she sits. There’s no harm in cultivating an aura of reason, if not helpfulness. She probably doesn’t need Deaton and Morell’s lessons anymore, but since experimenting with her magic today has been low on her to-do list, which has prominently featured Don’t collapse in the middle of the hallway at school and Don’t stab Olive Witherspoon as its main line items, she can’t be sure.
Lydia’s magic, before she remembered Camelot, had been small and useful and green, like a field of corn. Everything underneath her fingertips had glinted with potential and she’d slowly coaxed the stalks to ripeness under Deaton and Morell’s (blackmailed, but Lydia has never pretended to be above fighting dirty) guidance and occasional disdain. Guinevere had been an accomplished sorceress by the time of her death, the unfortunate result of spending the last ten years of her life as basically useless, and now Lydia’s magic has exploded like hothouse flowers. Because magic in Beacon Hills is so strongly tied to the land, Lydia feels it in the air as she breathes and the earth as she walks.
“Why don’t we just have a talk today?” Deaton says. “You mentioned last week that you were translating a new text for Stiles’ library. Would you like tea, Lydia?”
The air in the veterinary is cold and slightly recycled, in deference to all of the animal dander. Lydia strips off her jacket with studied casualness and says, “Yes, thank you,” as she adjusts the cuffs on her silk blouse. When she briefly presses her lips together, she can feel the slightly gummy tack of her lipstick. The physical reminders tether her to Lydia Martin, who dresses to kill and doesn’t give any fucks, and remove her from Guinevere’s uncertainty.
And, always, her magic hums under her skin: a buoy and a guide and a heart, beating with the pulse of the land. Lydia makes a mental note to have another talk with Derek about the rabbit population; it’s more problematic than she had originally presumed, back when she’d been basing it on insufficient sampling.
“Why don’t you tell us about this text?” Deaton suggests. Morell purses her lips and still hasn’t moved her eyes away from Lydia, her uncomfortable counselor stare pinned to Lydia’s forehead. It would almost make Lydia uncomfortable, except Lydia knows she’s impeccably put together and she refuses to find Morell’s psychology degree intimidating. Psychology is an imprecise social science with delusions of practicality.
As a spoon clinks against a ceramic cup in the canteen behind the welcome desk, Lydia crosses her left leg over her right and flicks her hair over her left shoulder. “At the moment there’s not much to report,” she says, raising and lowering one shoulder in a more elegant version of her father’s favorite insouciant shrug. “Stiles originally asked me to examine it in order to determine the likelihood of us suffering another situation with an incubus, but it isn’t about sex magic at all. Much to Stiles’ disappointment, I’m sure.” She accepts the cup as Deaton offers it, careful to actually touch the side of the mug and not float it into her hands.
The leaves swirling in the bottom of the mug tell her a particular story: valerian root to soothe her troubles and leave her more open to conversation, passiflora vine for emotional balance, and meadowsweet as the base, for flavor and as a stress-reliever. “I don’t have a headache,” she tells Deaton, since as far as she knows this tea is meant to reduce the symptoms of one.
“Consider it a preventative measure,” Deaton replies.
When she inhales the sweet steam rising off of the surface of the tea, it drifts inwards and tickles her nose. Meadowsweet reminds her of home and the spring-she can remember brewing mead for the summer solstice with the other ladies of the keep. She always collected the honey; the bees would never bother her much.
“Thank you,” she remembers to add, after her first sip.
Deaton gives her as much of a smile as he ever does and Morell’s mouth tightens in the corners. “If it’s not sex magic,” she says, drumming her purple fingernails against the ceramic of her mug with a series of small tinkling noises, “then what is it?”
“It looks most like an analysis of a compulsion spell of some kind.” Lydia drinks more of the tea, rolling it over her tongue, and then she launches into a technical explanation of what she’s read so far. Deaton and Morell are a satisfying audience. They’re smart enough to follow along but, unlike Stiles, don’t feel the compulsion to interrupt every other sentence. Maybe eventually Stiles will reach the point where he no longer needs to prove his worth to the pack via his intelligence, but that day is unlikely to occur within the next eighteen months, by Lydia’s estimation.
Morell flicks her eyes into a roll. “Alan, this town will never cease to be ridiculous,” she murmurs. “Please note that I’m not disputing the likelihood of a compulsion spell of that caliber coming into play, but Beacon Hills’ ability to attract the supernatural will never fail to astonish me.”
She drawls this last bit; Lydia gets the heavy-handed irony, that Morell is never astonished by anything. Since Lydia still doesn’t like Morell overmuch, she ignores the interjection. “The reason why Stiles must’ve found it in his research on incubi is probably that it’s been found before in towns where witches have used it to simulate an incubi infestation.”
Because the conversation is rooted mostly in the hypothetical, it drifts eventually from incubi and compulsion spells to hemlock dosing, and from there to a heated-as heated as Deaton ever gets, really, which is not much-debate concerning consent in ritual exorcisms. It’s the way that they treat her in this discussion, as less of a student and more of a teaching assistant, that tells Lydia that they have tactfully acknowledged that there isn’t much else for them to teach her in a practicum environment and as such the tenor of the lessons will be shifting in the future.
“Why don’t you come back on Monday,” Deaton offers as he holds the door for her to leave. Lydia finishes securing the last button on her jacket and briefly tugs at the fringe along the edge of her scarf-a tasteful amount; Allison should take note-and nods.
“Once a week from now on is fine for me,” she says. “Have a nice evening, Dr. Deaton, Ms. Morell.”
She can feel Morell’s eyes against her as she walks to her car and Morell’s suspicion in the way that the lights in the veterinary clinic flicker off when the engine turns over and she reverses out of her parking space. Her curiosity about the sudden surge in reincarnation in Beacon Hills is manageable, so she feels no need to outsource to Deaton or Morell. Why she remembers, why Boyd remembers, why her magic has changed: Lydia wants to know, of course, because she wants to know everything, but she isn’t burning inside out with curiosity. The external factor of her magical ability proves that this isn’t a case of someone messing around in their heads, at least, so she doesn’t need to worry about that.
Her mother is on a conference call when Lydia comes home and to judge by the sharp, furious note that cuts out from under the door to her study, she won’t be interested in dinner for another few hours. Lydia accordingly tosses together a salad and retires for her desk with it and a glass of lemonade, intent on hammering out the last details of the translation for Stiles.
She finds herself, two hours later, dipping the tip of her mechanical pencil into the half-empty glass of lemonade, eyes slightly glazed over, using the pale liquid to trace runes into the air. The translation hasn’t even been touched; she’s eaten maybe three leaves of spinach.
The runes burn out in the air in front of her. They shine like trapped, trembling sunlight, and they beg for something that Lydia isn’t prepared to give: resolution for that peculiar precipice on which Guinevere had teetered for so many years. She’d been a good, strong queen and a strong woman who’d maybe not been quite so good. She had loved her husband for many years and then, when he’d left her barren bed and gone to find his son elsewhere, she’d stayed faithful to him regardless of the desire in her heart.
Lydia despises Guinevere for that. What’s the point of being selfless, if you end up in the situation where Guinevere had found herself-childless at thirty-five, essentially isolated from her husband and the rest of her court, deserted by her champion and her friends? Lydia had done a book report on Katherine of Aragon in the fourth grade and she’d been filled with revulsion for her steady, plodding nature, for the way that she’d clung to her ideals instead of moving on with the times and using her position to win something more meaningful for her and her daughter.
Guinevere had been a powerful sorceress, the kind of sorceress rivaled only perhaps by Merlin and Morgana in all of Camelot, and although she’d fallen to Morgana’s infertility potion and Merlin had seduced her husband away, she’d still been better than everyone else. But she’d never used any of it.
“What’s the point?” Lydia asks, aloud, to her empty bedroom and the runes written in front of her. “Having it and not using it is stupid.”
Guinevere hadn’t even been particularly wise. Guinevere had been a victim, primarily. She’d met other queens of other lands-Snow, from the Enchanted Forest, and Regina from the Dark Lands, and even Ariel from her little island and Penelope, whose daughter had been dropped into a deep sleep on the eve of her engagement-and always Guinevere had sunk back into the shade thrown by their vibrancy and purpose.
Pathetic, Lydia thinks, the word burning deep into her skin and further, into the wrinkled, membranous flesh of her stomach and intestines and heart and lungs. She opens her hand, letting the pencil fall, and splays her fingers so that the lemonade runes can sink into the meat of her palm. They’re meaningless jumbles, for strength and protection and mental acuity-things Lydia has in spades-but they still buzz under her skin and set off synapses in her head.
Lydia will allow nothing to jeopardize the years’ worth of effort she has put into building Lydia Martin, mathematical wunderkind and couture connoisseur. There is purity of purpose in Lydia that she refuses to sacrifice, even to Guinevere’s sensitive, high-strung demands of emotional comfort and the gentleness of Lancelot’s hands as he’d helped her from her horse and carried her basket of cuttings to the storeroom and swung her through a jig during the Yule feast. Lydia Martin is no longer Guinevere, Queen of the Summer Country; there’s no reason for her to assume that Vernon Boyd is still Lancelot.
~
Unlike everyone else Lydia knows, Derek parks outside of her house and leans on the horn rather than coming up to the front door. Lydia recognizes that his family all burned to death and it was very heartbreaking and difficult for him and many a violin played Mendelsohn tragically in the background while he cried bloody tears, but he wasn’t raised in a barn. Lydia remembers Mrs. Hale, who’d been the children’s librarian at Beacon Hills Public Library, like she remembers everything else-perfectly-and Mrs. Hale had not been the kind of woman who tolerated poor manners in her children.
As such, Lydia finishes applying a second layer of top coat as Derek sounds the Camaro’s horn again, and then she changes her Facebook status, checks her eyeliner for irregularity, and gives the irises that her mom has in a crystal vase over the fireplace a little extra va-va-voom; Lydia has never liked dying flowers. Peter Hale had been especially fond of metaphors during his tenure in Lydia’s head, and if she never has to hear someone waxing lyrically about a waning orchid it will be too soon.
Eventually, her phone rings; it’s Derek, of course. He’s the only one other than Deaton who likes to pretend that text messaging doesn’t exist.
“Hello?” Lydia answers, checking her nail polish for chips or stray hairs.
“Get your ass in the car, Martin,” Derek growls.
Lydia blows on her left pinkie and gently nudges a piece of lint out of the danger zone with her thumb. “What do we say?” she asks in a sweet, singsong tone.
“Get out here before I rip your throat out with my teeth,” Derek says, parroting her sweet voice. He sounds like a chain-smoking Southern belle; Lydia can imagine that there’s a story there, but, unlike Stiles, she isn’t obsessed with discerning every nuance of Derek Hale’s tragic backstory.
“Nice try,” Lydia says, “but I’m not Stilinski.” She hangs up.
Two minutes later, her doorbell rings. Lydia’s been sitting on the living room couch for the past minute and thirty seconds, composing the email she always sends her grandmother on the first of the month; she saves her careful examination of MIT and Caltech’s respective math departments and goes to answer the door.
The look on Derek’s face could melt iron, but Lydia’s made of sterner stuff. “Hello, Derek,” she says breezily, elbowing him out of the way so she can step out onto her porch. “Thanks for giving me a ride.”
“Is that really how this is going?” Derek demands, flashing her a bit of side-fang in the afternoon sunlight. “Thanks for the ride?”
“I was showing you how people with manners respond in normal situations,” Lydia replies, yanking the door shut and slamming her key into the front lock. “I realize ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are generally foreign concepts to people who live in subway cars, but that’s why I’ve taken it upon myself to educate you. Without manners you might as well go back to living in the woods with fur.”
Derek reaches out and mimes strangling her. “Believe it or not, this disaster will not postpone itself because you’re playing Miss Manners, Lydia.”
“I thought you and the other wolves killed all of the red caps, Derek,” Lydia says. “If this does qualify as a disaster, whose fault would that be, exactly?”
“Probably the girl who almost drowned,” Derek says tightly. He puts his hand against the back of her head and shoves her towards his car; he really must be concerned, because Derek rarely shows physical imposition against anyone except Stiles nowadays. “Get in the goddamn car, Lydia.”
“Pushy,” Lydia remarks. “There must be another cluster of them in the preserve, then.”
All Derek does is twitch as he crosses in front of his car; it means she’s right but he doesn’t want to lose whatever tenuous hold he currently has over the situation. Derek’s leadership issues are adorable, and by adorable Lydia means excessively annoying. She’s toyed with signing him up for some kind of leadership camp experience for this summer-something for him to do while the rest of the pack deals with orientation and buying desk lamps and other pre-college things-but she imagines that he’d just spend it unproductively, lurking in dark corners and texting Stiles.
Stiles is the only person Derek will text. It’s another thing that Lydia finds irritating.
“We won’t be able to hunt them until sundown,” she reminds Derek once he’s joined her inside his car and turned it on with an overwhelming roar. Even though Lydia has read plenty of classic Freud and knows enough to make fun of the Psychology Today links that show up on her newsfeed, it would take a team of crack psychologists with a lot of NSF funding to delve into the full depths of what the Camaro represents in the domain of Derek’s shattered psyche.
“We’re doing this new thing,” Derek says, grinding into a gear that somehow enables him to go even faster, “where we plan before we venture out into dangerous situations.”
“Oh, are we?” Lydia replies with a raised eyebrow. She’s trying a new thing where she’s pretending that Derek driving his car like a NASCAR reject doesn’t make the skin want to peel off of her fingers. “That’s exciting.”
“Hopefully not too exciting,” Derek says drily. “The goal is to cut back on excitement.”
“Please, stop with the euphemisms,” Lydia says, waving a hand at him. “Your uncle had a fondness for them and I still have lingering trauma related to that.”
Derek mutters something about how they all have lingering trauma thanks to Peter, and now that Lydia has officially ventured deep enough into emotional vulnerability to fill her daily quota for Ms. Morell, she decides to take them back out. “As touching as this bonding moment has been, I’d much rather talk about the red caps. Presumably a plan is in development that doesn’t involve essentially cornering them in the middle of their territory and hoping no one drowns?”
Now that he’s been given the okay to be a shithead, Derek blazes forth with all engines roaring. He and Lydia bicker for the entire drive back to pack headquarters, which is the Stilinski residence this week while the sheriff is out of town at a state-mandated conference. Just to be an asshole, Derek starts in on Sun Tzu halfway through their conversation, and Lydia obviously can’t let that stand. It’s like waving an evolutionary psychology study with a sample size of N=10 in front of her face and expecting her not to rip it to shreds.
They haven’t progressed to full-out yelling-Lydia Martin is never anything but flawlessly classy-but Derek is definitely growling more than he is enunciating his vowels by the time he brakes in the sheriff’s cruiser’s usual parking space and he and Lydia pour out onto the Stilinski’s front lawn, Lydia openly baiting Derek about his stereotypical preferences in military science literature.
“It’s nice that you think a few quotes from the Art of War are going to cure our difficulties, but the red caps are not human,” Lydia points out, jabbing an index finger towards Derek’s chest. “Ascribing human motives to them would be foolhardy and short-sighted and I thought the whole point of reevaluating our plan of attack was to reduce the amount of incurred risk.”
“Okay, time out,” Stiles says, stepping onto the porch and throwing a hand out in either direction.
“Shut up, Stiles,” Derek and Lydia both growl.
“No, seriously, my house and my rules. Table the debate on ancient Chinese military tactics and put on your big boy pants.”
“Over my dead body are we using Sun Tzu to mandate our plan of attack against the red caps. In the first place, it’s intellectually immature.” Lydia makes sure to smack Derek in the chest with her purse as she steps past him. He’s basically incapable of disobeying Stiles, which is a trait Lydia doesn’t share and of which she is perfectly willing to take advantage. “Secondly, red caps aren’t human and therefore human war strategy won’t work on them. It’s cute that you think it will, but it won’t.” She smiles at Stiles, and it isn’t a pleasant expression. “No need to play Mom, I’m done.”
When she breezes past Stiles into his living room, most of the pack is arrayed on various pieces of furniture, draped like Annie Leibovitz is going to show up to shoot the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair at any second. All that’s missing is the couture, really, and while Lydia had made a pact with herself very early on not to have any feelings about Jackson moving away, whether they be positive or negative, she misses knowing at least one other person at pack meetings could be guaranteed to have touched something by Chanel in their lifetime.
Boyd is in the far corner, looming above the only open armchair, his face inscrutable and distant. Now is not the time for Guinevere to be having inconvenient feelings all over Lydia’s carefully-maintained aura of perfect composure; to prove it, Lydia walks through the sea of Beta limbs thrown across the Stilinskis’ living room floor and settles delicately into the open armchair. Her skin feels scattered pricks of heat from where Boyd’s hand is resting against the left shoulder of the armchair.
“Hello, Lydia,” he says, deliberate and low.
“Hello, Boyd,” she says. Very few things ever choose to disobey Lydia Martin, but her voice cracks over the last consonant of his name. It would be imperceptible to human ears, but naturally Lydia is surrounded by supernatural creatures with excessively good hearing; Scott and Isaac’s heads swivel towards her in unison.
“Are you-” Isaac tries, and then he thinks better of it when Lydia gives him the chilly look that she had whetted against Stephanie Lin, who had cried every day of freshman year and is now probably a stronger person because of it.
“Yes?” Lydia asks sweetly. She nails Scott with her stare next, but he’s made of slightly more impervious stuff now that he’s buoyed by the force of Allison’s love or whatever other teenage drama nonsense floats through his brain instead of the material for their AP Physics class.
“Are you okay?” Scott asks, all well-meaning interest and sympathy, his big puppy eyes earnestly blinking in Lydia’s direction. She wants to take a firm grip on his Justin Bieber mess of a haircut and slam him face-first into the Stilinskis’ coffee table; even though she suppresses that particular urge, Scott still yelps a second later when his glass of soda burbles over the rim and splashes Coke all over his shirt and jeans. He carefully put the glass onto the coffee table and goes into the kitchen to clean himself off.
As she nestles back into the armchair, checking her cuticles with an air purposely meant to discourage conversation, she feels the heat of Boyd’s body and the strength of his presence as he leans over the back of the armchair and breathes into her ear, “That was unsubtle.”
“Well, thank God Scott’s thicker than Julia Russell’s thighs, then,” Lydia says, not bothering to whisper. Whispers perpetuate intimacy, and the last thing Lydia needs is to trick herself into a return to intimacy with Lancelot. She wonders sometimes, when she’s being very weak-willed and there’s no one around to witness it, if Lance found his true love after he left Camelot. He’d told her on his last night in the castle, with an involuntary grimace, that he was trapped by his love for her-one that she obviously couldn’t return, considering her husband and the kingdom and everything it represented-and he needed to leave Camelot to free himself before it killed him.
She respects his decision. It had nearly broken Guinevere into pieces at the time-Lancelot had been the last of her allies to stay in Camelot after Mordred had been born and it had become obvious that Guinevere wielded a fading power-but Lydia understands self-preservation in light of the state of affairs in Beacon Hills. Guinevere had been a parasite; Lancelot had made the best of a bad hand of cards by leaving.
Boyd laughs as he draws back, and his breath drifts in a gust of warmth across the exposed skin of her neck, ruffling the neckline of her sweater. Lydia can control her breathing and she can wrest her heartbeat into normalcy through sheer force of will, but she can’t do a thing to stop her magic from reacting. The new power from the return of her memories still sits uneasily under her skin as Lydia Martin; at the sudden reminder of a familiar presence, combined with the sheer unpredictability that always goes hand-in-hand with the first of May, the power simmers and snaps until her fingers tingle and the air around her crackles with the smell of ozone and ginger.
A fire snaps to life in the Stilinskis’ fireplace. Isaac makes a high-pitched squeak and flattens himself against the back of the couch. Erica makes the same noise but doesn’t move, which Lydia respects. From the doorway, Stiles, his hand resting against Derek’s back, says, “Way to be a show-off, Lydia,” and, like always, Lydia has no earthly idea what Boyd is thinking.
“Are we going to begin any time soon?” she asks, zeroing in on a stray fleck of nail polish on her left ring finger. “Some of us have things to do this weekend.”
She means studying for her AP Physics test on Monday-she gets in the habit of studying even if it’s unnecessary, like it is for physics, because it keeps her sharp and focused-but Erica rolls her eyes and says, “We’re all very sad that you’re missing Josh Grabowski’s party, but actually no fucks are given about your social life.”
“That’s so cute,” Lydia tells her. “The way that you pretend you have no interest in Josh’s party this weekend. Good for you.” Something about Erica rubs Lydia the wrong way; it’s definitely intentional on Erica’s part, and probably relates to her tragic backstory pre-bite, like most of the behavior deficiencies in the pack do, but Lydia only has so much room in her teeny tiny soul to wedge in caring for a few individuals. Stiles and Allison take up the majority of the real estate currently available.
“Meow,” Stiles says. “Um, if the cats could sheathe their claws? There is, in fact, something we need to talk about.”
“Try comparing me to a kitten one more time, Stiles,” Erica growls, “and we’ll see what happens.” She bares her teeth to Stiles, who rolls his eyes in an exaggerated imitation of Erica herself, and it’s enough to make Boyd and Isaac laugh and take down the tension in the room by a few degrees. The fire in the grate, which is sustaining itself without any fuel, flickers and calms into something a little less than a total blaze.
“Oh, cool,” Scott says coming back from the kitchen, his attention drawn by the change in light. “Thanks for whoever started that, it was getting pretty chilly in here and the Sheriff threatens to cut someone whenever the thermostat inches above 60.” As far as conversation shifts go, it’s not the most obvious one they’ve ever had to suffer through, so. Things move on.
The new plan is only slightly less stupid than the previous one, but at least it requires Lydia to stay home and scry rather than traipse through swamp muck in a new pair of shoes. Lydia realizes that Stiles has a burning desire to be recognized as an equally important member of their pack, despite his being human and lacking the ability to do impressive things with a crossbow, but Lydia’s self-esteem problems don’t extend far enough that she feels the need to put herself in constant physical danger. As Stiles aggressively campaigns to be included on the field trip, Lydia begins to write a shopping list on her phone for what she’s going to need from Deaton’s office and her own personal collection.
“Boyd, stay with Lydia,” Derek orders as Stiles grips the front of his shirt and begins to forcibly push him towards the stairs. He’s not going anywhere unless he wants to be, which makes his whole pretend-struggle just look ridiculous and juvenile; Stiles appears slightly less pissed off in the face of it, though, so maybe Derek isn’t a complete failure at his stupidly co-dependent, unhealthy relationship. “The rest of you, regroup at the house at sundown.”
As she leaves, Erica nails Lydia with an unhappy, threatening stare and Lydia returns a blank bitch-face that is, according to Stiles, nationally competitive. If Erica wants to make a scene and finally reveal why, exactly, she despises every word out of Lydia’s mouth, Lydia can block out time in her schedule for it. Lydia has very little patience for people who threaten without following through, though, which is why she stopped being scared of Derek very early in their relationship.
Eventually, Lydia and Boyd are left alone in the Stilinskis’ living room, with only the sound of Stiles shouting at Derek upstairs tinkling through the background. “What do you need?” Boyd asks finally. He has yet to come around from behind the armchair, but Lydia doesn’t have it in her to be uncomfortable with Boyd at her back. She has too many years of memories as Guinevere where having Lancelot at her back was just about the only protection she had against the forces that would’ve ripped her throne away.
“Ginseed oil and a new leather thong from Deaton-mine snapped during the thing with the ghouls-and my crystals and tapers from home.” Lydia scrolls down her list to the end, where she’s written rosemary again? “Maybe a stop at Raley’s.”
“Deaton’s first,” Boyd suggests. “Then Raley’s.”
Lydia’s a smart girl; she hears the hesitation in his voice, the way that he pauses and asks without words to be invited into her home. She’s hosted the occasional rotating pack meeting when her mother is out of town, but she hasn’t since her birthday and the sudden reemergence of her memories. The way that he asks is all Boyd. Lancelot had never been particularly great with the subtle sort of boundary.
She wonders, like she has at least seven times in the last two days, what happened in the childhood of Vernon Boyd to create a man so much more taciturn than Lancelot. He lives with his Aunt Heni in a neat clapboard house on the edge of town; his two jobs are to pay for the live-in nurse that takes care of Heni. She knows that his mother cleared out when he was thirteen; she knows that he puts black pepper on his macaroni and cheese.
Lydia has never heard him say any of this; she’s good with context clues, inferences, and extracting information from Stiles. In another world, she might be capable of opening her mouth and asking, without sounding like she has an ulterior motive, what it was like, to have parents who completely gave up on the pretense of caring about you, parents who stopped pretending that they were going to come back and just left altogether. This other Lydia might be able to ask him why he so obviously loves his Aunt Heni, even though the presence of the live-in nurse and some basic research into genealogy would reveal that she’s 95 and probably senile. How do you love someone who isn’t even really there?
Hypothetical questions are only fun when there’s the possibility of them actually being answered.
Lydia stands and pockets her phone. “Stiles might have rosemary. There’s no reason to go to Raley’s if that’s the case.” When Boyd doesn’t move, she waves her hand at him. “I’ll meet you in the car. Deaton’s, then home. If my mother asks-which she won’t-you’re my partner for that feudal infrastructure project in AP Econ.”
Boyd says, “I am your partner for the AP Econ feudal infrastructure project.”
“I finished that paper a month ago,” Lydia says dismissively, leaving him behind as she makes her way into the kitchen, where pots of herbs are lining the sill above the sink. There’s a small, struggling rosemary plant, fighting against an onslaught of lemonbalm, in the glazed blue pot furthest to the left. Lydia says a small prayer of thanks to the plant for its gift and then twists three stems off in quick succession, before wrapping them in a paper towel and tucking them into the pocket of her jacket.
The other two pots on the sill are green and yellow; the yellow one, on the right and closest to the fridge, is filled with wisteria that Lydia is having Stiles root for her. Before remembering Guinevere, setting down roots had always been the most difficult part of nature magic for Lydia. The original idea had been to plant vines around all of the entryways of her house; a guard in the future against shitheads like Peter Hale getting any stupid ideas.
Wisteria protects because it represents steadfastness. When Lydia reaches for one of the newly emerging petals, it unfurls, hot and velvet, across her finger. The whole kitchen scents of it, thick and heavy, and the plant grows-harder, faster, until the base of its pot cracks and the roots spill out over the sink, greedily sucking water from the lip of the washbasin. Lydia can’t see out the window anymore for the profusion of blooms, but still it grows. It’s so hungry. Steadiness needs some kind of foundation; devotion can’t actually be built on thin air, no matter what Scott thinks.
Sorry about the pot, Lydia writes on the notepad stuck to the fridge. She leaves it pinned to the mess of dirt and plant that’s erupted out of the windowsill and then she leaves the house, Stiles and Derek yelling at each other upstairs and the wisteria blossoms pressing against the glass of the kitchen window, for Boyd and his silent car.
~
As twilight falls into night, Lydia lights the candles around her scrying circle and rubs her palms together briskly, trying to stave off the inevitable symptoms of low circulation. Boyd is somewhere behind her, hovering in the shadows like Derek has started giving lurking lessons, but Lydia’s focus is entirely devoted to what is in front of her. She’d added the last of the water with an eyedropper, to ensure flawlessly level surface tension; the steel grey of the water reflects Lydia’s face back to her, her eyes huge in her pale face.
Lydia dislikes scrying for the same reason she dislikes psychology and string theory: it’s imprecise and inclined to fail when tested on a large enough sample size. But if Derek needs her to scry for the last surviving red caps and it’s the best plan out of the others offered by his Greek chorus of Betas, Lydia will scry for him.
At first, everything goes well-she chants directives under her breath as she swings the crystal in a clockwise motion above the surface of the bowl, letting the power of the crystal shiver across the water. After a while, the ripples begin to shape images, and these images distend themselves away from the bowl, taking on the shape of the bog, of Derek and Stiles and Scott, of Allison with a fierce, concentrated expression and her bow drawn.
Lydia narrates steadily to Boyd, who should be relaying the information on to Derek, and everything goes peachy until they finally reach the red caps and Lydia changes the direction of the crystal, intending to send the images back down to the water and break the connection, because her crystal stops moving.
“Shit,” Lydia breathes, and the crystal starts to melt against the water.
“What do you need?” Boyd asks. Lydia’s already begun her disaster response compartmentalization; the part of her brain that can deal with inanities respects that Boyd doesn’t flail or ask stupid questions about what’s happening. If Lydia knew what was going on, there wouldn’t be a problem.
“Break the circle,” Lydia tells him, unwinding the thong from around her hand and trying to keep her fingers from trembling. As long as the water doesn’t spill out of the bowl, things are still at a manageable level. “At the western point,” she adds a second later when she can’t see him moving. “Blow out the candle. Push the smoke out of the circle.”
“I have done this once or twice, Gwen,” he reminds her as he circles around to the western point. His brows are drawn low over his eyes with deep concentration.
Lydia hears his slip, but now is not the time for that conversation. There will likely never be a time for that conversation, although she has three contingencies in place for reasons why he might call her Gwen in public in front of other members of the pack; the third one isn’t Stiles-proof, but it’ll do well enough with the rest of the pack. “Magic was different in Camelot,” she bites out. She locks her biceps to prevent shaking; the liquid at the tip of the melting crystal is beginning to form a drop.
Boyd licks the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and positions his left behind the flame, inside of the circle. Lydia can feel the intrusion like a small pinch; it’s sort of how an needle feels going into skin treated with a local anesthetic, except that Lydia’s never been interested in needle-play and Boyd’s hand in her circle changes the flavor of things.
“Now, if you would,” Lydia snaps, and Boyd closes his thumb and forefinger over the flame, following immediately after with his left hand cupped to encourage the smoke out of the circle. Lydia feels the spell magic snap across the back of her hand and she lets go of the crystal, her arm hot from relieved tension. The crystal stays suspended for one second, and another, and then it falls into the water with a small splash, sending a wave of water over the rim of the bowl onto the floor.
“What was that?” Boyd asks.
“I don't know,” Lydia says tightly, before she can even think of something clever or pointed or distracting. When she splays her hands over the water and tries to feel for what might have caused the disturbance, she gets nothing. Even her scrying crystal, misshapen and solid again at the base of the bowl, has lost its aura.
“I’ll call Derek,” Boyd says. “Check up on everyone. You should sit down.”
Lydia nods, eyes closed, still shaping the outline of the scrying field above the water. “You do that,” she tells him, trying to tease out the edges of the field. There should be some kind of aftereffect, even if it’s just the hemispherical haze of the field itself, but Lydia’s magic pushes against nothing.
Lydia has always enjoyed practicing magic because, like math, it presents her with the opportunity to map a set of circumstances that might otherwise be left unexplainable. She likes how magic makes her feel, too; Lydia enjoys fields where she has to work at becoming the best but it’s still attainable. Too many things come to her easily for her to trust them with her full attention.
Still, Lydia hasn’t been unable to explain a magical phenomenon in a year and a half. With Guinevere’s thirty-plus years of experience hovering in the back of her head, there should be very little that is inexplicable to Lydia. No matter what Stiles says-and Stiles says a lot, most of it nonsense; smoke and mirrors meant to dissuade the listener from paying attention to him beyond superficial concerns-magic follows rules. Magic, unlike string theory, does not dissolve into a set of contradictory terms.
“Everything has a reason,” Lydia murmurs to herself, curling her fingers into claws and trying to draw up some kind of reading through sheer willpower.
She feels when Boyd returns; his physical presence always pushes at the edges of her consciousness. It shatters what little concentration she could pull together, and all it leaves behind is Lydia’s most hated feeling-gnawing, grasping emptiness and a need for knowledge. She’s not as bad as Stiles when it comes to some research, mainly because she doesn’t have self-control problems, but Lydia is very, very bad with puzzles she cannot solve.
“Are they all right?” she asks. She leaves her hands out and her eyes closed so that she has an excuse for ignoring him handy if she needs one.
“Nothing connected to what happened here. Some bumps, all healable. Derek said they finished off the last of the red caps and the swamp disappeared.”
“Yes, well, that took long enough,” Lydia says. Her hands, which have been steady through this entire process, begin to shiver. She tells herself that it’s exhaustion, and then an overuse of her power resources, and then she stops kidding herself and tags it as what it really is, which is the first time that she and Boyd have been alone and distraction-free in a room together since they remembered that Arthur is dead and her husband is therefore no longer any kind of impediment.
The pressure that’s been sitting on Lydia’s pelvic bone all day begins to simmer and rise. Does the room smell of wisteria or is that just her projecting? She normally has much better control over her physical senses. She normally has better control over everything, including herself, but the absence of extraneous magic in the room is making hers pulse stronger, and to judge by the way that Boyd takes a breath-overloud in the silence of the room, the beginning of a gasp at the end-he can smell it.
As if to give herself permission, Lydia tells herself very firmly, This will only be a bad idea if it happens more than once, and then she puts down her hands and opens her eyes. Boyd is stationed across from her, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his massive chest, his face inscrutable in the shadows left by the four remaining candles. She used to be able to read Lancelot so easily.
She wants to ask, Why don’t you laugh anymore? She wants to know about the years in between his acquaintance with her. She wants to know about what he did after he left Camelot, how he buried the ache that he used to carry in his eyes for her, whether he found something as strong and destructive as Merlin and Arthur had had between them, if he misses the queen that he served after he left her, the one with her beautiful husband and their shining, glossy castle.
It’s Beltane; if there’s ever a time where the earth demands a stupid kind of decision-making process, it’s now.
They meet less than halfway, four of Boyd’s steps to Lydia’s two, and he’s licked his way inside of her mouth before she has time to think about closing her eyes. She feels his eyelashes-they’re long, dark, and thin-against the bridge of her nose as he tilts her head to the left, his tongue curling over the ridge of her bottom teeth. He’s hot like Jackson had been, after the change, running at an average temperature ten degrees Fahrenheit hotter than Lydia’s normal human mean, and it means that Lydia knows exactly where his body is at all times in relation to hers.
Boyd is a biter, but it’s more symbolic than forceful-he nips at the heavy curve of her upper lip and then the corner of her mouth and out towards where she would have a dimple, if she was the kind of girl who had dimples, genetically speaking. He rubs his cheek against hers and the motion is faintly abrasive from end-of-the-day stubble but nothing that manages to convince Lydia that this is a bad idea.
Then, his mouth is on the lobe of her ear and then behind her ear, where she dabs perfume as part of her morning routine, and then down the line of her sternocleidomastoid muscle to the meat of her shoulder, the place where her collarbone melts into her neck, and his bite there is more aggressive before he follows immediately after with a hot, soothing kiss, his tongue pressing against the developing bruise.
There’s a high-pitched noise coming from the back of Lydia’s throat, dragged from her by the way that he tilts her head back with a single hand and stretches the muscle of her neck for his perusal. She wants to see more of him, and the candles flare in recognition of that, responding eagerly to Lydia’s wordless, stupid keening noise, the way that she scrambles to fix the height separation between them, hiking her skirt higher up her thighs so she can press against him.
Boyd’s skin reflects copper and burgundy against the flat shadows of the rest of the room; he visually blazes like he feels against her bare skin. She palms his shirt and tries to lift it over his head but she can’t, not while he’s worrying a line of skin down her shoulder with his teeth. “Clothing removal is not optional,” she tells him in a low rumble and he laughs, Lancelot’s laugh but different, less confident and more shell-shocked; it forces him to release her and she takes advantage of that to rip his shirt over his head.
One or both of them must knock the scrying bowl to the floor because Boyd lifts her with a hand under her ass, the other pressing in a hard, long stroke down her back, and he sets her down on the table where it had sat and there’s nothing to prevent Lydia from leaning back and whipping her sweater over her head. She doesn’t even think about her hair, or her eyeliner, or the various other things that she’s used to keep herself occupied during sex before-Lydia’s attention span is better than Stiles’ but not by much and especially not when its only distraction is a sixteen-year-old boy more interested in humping against her thigh than doing anything even remotely pleasurable-before she plasters herself against his front and sinks her fingernails into his scalp.
Lydia doesn’t even recognize all of the things she’s chanting under her breath; little cries and moans and the heat of the candles and Boyd’s skin and the warmth of the wooden table under her ass and it bleeds together with the sickening smell of wisteria blossoms, undercut by the bite of the rosemary. Boyd’s fingers finally stop fucking around and slip under the waistband of her tights, peeling the chiffon off of her sweaty skin and then slowly down her legs, because Boyd is patient and his eyes have turned golden and his fangs are pressing against his lower lip as all of his concentration focuses on the curl of her tights against the inside of her knee.
“Lydia,” he says, in a weird voice, lisping from his fangs, and then he thumbs the base of her throat and slants his mouth across hers and everything tastes metallic and drugging like velvet for a second before he releases his mouth to realign their lower bodies. His hand encircles her entire knee and he presses his fore- and middle finger against the back of her knee, tickling her until she can’t decide whether to laugh or to shiver helplessly. Lydia Martin never does helpless, even now, so instead she bites into the thick muscle of his left pectoral, hard enough to raise blood, hard enough to leave a fleeting mark in his impervious werewolf skin.
And then finally, finally, like Lydia hasn’t been waiting for him to touch her for the past twenty years, like they don’t have any history of staring at each other across crowded corridors or that stupid, reckless, first and final kiss, like their history is as clean as if they were and always had been nothing more than a pair of teenagers, he presses his thumb against her clit and completes some kind of circuit.
“Foreplay is nice,” Lydia tells him once she can see straight, “if you haven’t been doing it for years and I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing, but you’re not,” and she’s scrambling for the button closure to his jeans and he’s digging through his pockets for a condom and for a handful of seconds it’s just awkward teenage sex again, even if it’s awkward teenage sex in the middle of a scrying circle etched into Lydia’s mother’s morning parlor, and Lancelot and Guinevere and their aching romantic drama feels the furthest that they’ve ever been.
But then they’re not, because when they are finally together, Boyd sunk so deeply inside of Lydia that she’s sort of bonelessly draped over the table, every nerve in her body tingling with a resting potential that could short out the entirety of Beacon County’s electrical grid, the sharp edge of his pelvic bone resting, like a friendly hello, against the jut of Lydia’s own, all she can see behind her closed eyelids is Lancelot riding in the first tournament that he’d won with her favor, as queen’s champion, and the way that she’d wrapped her magic through the links in his chain mail and kept him close.
So, in a way, this is all Guinevere’s fault. From the first moment that she let herself be caught by her husband’s best boy-knight, she’d made all of this happen.
“Lydia,” Boyd murmurs against the still skin of her stomach, “I don’t make love to dead women.”
“Oh, you’re so romantic,” she flutters, pressing a palm to her sticky chest. “Do you say that to all the girls?”
He says, “There weren’t other girls, Gwen,” and somehow-God knows how he finds the space-he sinks in an inch deeper, slowly, as if he has all of the time in the world to finish tearing her into pieces.
“I'm not an idiot,” she says to the ceiling, trying to focus on the patterns left by the candles instead of the too many feelings sparking across her clit from the pressure he’s exerting against it. She doesn’t need placating lies; they’re boring.
“None meant this,” he says, and unlike the four or five times Lydia has heard this in the past, from boyfriends tired of trying to keep up with her insane demands and Arthur explaining why the hell his court sorceress has given birth to a child that is his splitting image, Boyd sounds solid and sure instead of desperate; he isn’t pleading with her. “It has been and will always be you.”
It’s the endorphins, Lydia thinks. She can draw the molecular structure of every chemical currently coursing through Boyd’s brain, convincing him that he’s in love; she can name them, both in alphabetical order and the order in which they occur in the signaling pathway. Instead of doing that, she traces the outline of a benzene ring against his forearm and says, “I’m not the same.”
“No,” he agrees, and this is apparently the only signal that he needs to decide that, in fact, moving would be a good idea; he slides out and then thrusts back in, and every inch of lubricated flesh feels the slide of warmth and friction and God damn it this is probably the worst time for them to be talking about this, so Lydia does what she does best and takes control of an otherwise disastrous situation. She sits up, sucks his tongue into her mouth, and bites down until his hips begin to stutter and his breathing stops altogether.
After Lydia’s come and he’s come and they’re both now half-naked, sprawled across a miraculously unbroken table, Lydia spits out her mouthful of blood and lazily unloops her legs around his hips. “My mother will probably be home soon,” she says. “I lost track of time but she’s usually back by eight.”
“It’s after ten,” Boyd mumbles into her shoulder. His breathing is still erratic and his skin is moving in little jerking shivers under her touch. “I can feel the moon.”
That’s a neat treat. “Great,” Lydia says. “You need to leave, then. My curfew is at eleven.”
Lydia doesn’t even feel bad about how much of a total lie that is-not only does Lydia not have a curfew, it wouldn’t be at eleven if she did-because it accomplishes what she needs it to, which is Boyd puts his shirt back on and leaves Lydia in the wreck of her scrying circle to have a very brief panic attack that in no way resembles one of Stiles’ infamous shitfests. Then, after she’s forced her heartbeat back into a normal range and cleaned up the wreck of the morning parlor, she puts on a pair of fleece pajamas and watches The Notebook in the living room with a bowl of microwaved kettle corn.
[part iii]