Stiles's Arc

Chapter 10 of 20

The little blue jeep rolled through the dark, headlights cutting a narrow path home. Stiles drummed the wheel. Lydia sat quiet in the back. Scott and Kira would meet them at the house. The new board waited. Six victims. One wrong creature. Something still out there. Then Lydia went rigid. "Stop the car." Stiles hit the brakes hard. She was already opening the door, already walking, pulled by something he couldn't hear. He grabbed a flashlight and followed her off the shoulder, into the grass, toward the twisted trees that marked where the woods began to swallow the road. She stopped at a bent bicycle, rusted and orange and blue, frame folded around a root. "Lydia," Stiles whispered. She didn't answer. She walked three more steps and went still under the gnarled branches, head tilted, listening to nothing. Stiles swept the flashlight low. The beam caught a sneaker. Then a leg. Then a boy their age, curled in the dirt, breathing shallow. Gold bracelets. A small ankh on a cord at his throat. Blood on his shirt that didn't match any wound pattern Stiles had ever mapped. Stiles dropped beside him and shouted for help. Headlights swung in behind the jeep — Scott and Kira, doubling back when they didn't arrive. Scott was already running. He knelt, pressed two fingers to the boy's neck. "He's alive." Then the boy's eyes cracked open, glowing a sharp, familiar gold. Stiles felt the air leave his chest. "We take him to Deaton," Scott said. No hesitation. Stiles slid his arms under the boy's shoulders and helped lift. "Okay, cool, love that we've upgraded from mysterious murders to mysterious glowing teenagers. Super normal Tuesday." The board would have to wait. Whatever was killing people had just left them a survivor — and the case Stiles had been building alone was no longer his to finish quietly.