Tether ⌲ Stiles Stilinski [2]

nineteen

The police still hadn't tracked down Barrow. One could assume that he was hiding out somewhere, trying to heal his surgical wounds before launching another attack. Considering the fact that one of his potential targets had been the high school, it was unsurprising that a massive amount of the student body had stayed home from school the next day. Even a lot of teachers had skipped out. It left the few students who had come without enough support to attend our usual classes. Instead, the majority of us were huddled in the library as we had been all afternoon, treating the day like one long free period.

It was Halloween, and I could hear Danny's conversation at another table about him hosting a party later tonight. I wasn't sure yet if I would be making the effort to attend. After last night, I was still shaken by the look on Isaac's face when he had been attacked by some unknown force.

In exchange for keeping quiet, Chris allowed him to stay at our place overnight. Allison had stayed home with him today as well, seemingly to comfort him or keep him company. She had assured my father that they would be studying. Part of me wondered if she would instead be combing through the bestiary once more, looking for some kind of creature who wore a mask like Isaac had described. Another part of me wondered if they'd be getting any kind of work done at all. Normally, I would've expected Chris to protest the idea of them getting more alone time because of the compromising scene he had previously walked in on. But he was so consumed with the fear of being the actual target of whatever attacked Isaac, that he didn't seem to have the time nor energy to fight it.

Meanwhile, I sat across from Lydia at our table, pretending to pour over my history notes. I wasn't sure how to bring up what had happened the day before. My biggest fear was that the embarrassment of our mistake, and Lydia's subsequent denial, would cause a rift between us.

I nudged her leg gently with my foot. She looked up at me with big blue eyes. "We're okay, right?"

"Why wouldn't we be?" Lydia said, pursing her lips.

I simply shook my head and she turned back to her work. Beside me, Stiles wasn't doing any school work. Instead, he was studying a case file about William Barrow and circling certain passages and words as if on the hunt for clues to add to the walls of his room. Scott also seemed like his mind was elsewhere. I noticed how he stayed on the same page of his textbook for twenty minutes.

After a while, Lydia huffed and reached into her bag. Rummaging for a moment, she took out a small bottle of pain relief pills and swallowed one. I was tempted to ask her to hand me one too.

"Headache?" I asked.

She met my eyes once more. For a moment, they flickered something to me. Something of recognition, or fear of being caught out. No matter how much she vocally denied it, I knew she could still hear the noise like I could. The same incessant buzzing as yesterday. She had to understand that we had been onto something when we had thought Barrow was at the school. But in a blink, that look evaporated from her eyes.

Lydia shrugged. "Yeah. I'm pretty sure Scott's cologne has now permanently burned itself into my nostrils."

Stiles let out a snort of laughter while Scott fidgeted and tried to sniff his own shirt collar.

"Is it that obvious?" he shifted nervously.

"Who exactly are you trying to impress?" Lydia hummed. "Trying to gather the courage to ask someone to the party tonight?"

"I've got a dinner. With Kira."

"A dinner?" I leaned forward, intrigued. "Like a date kind of dinner?"

"Like a meet the parents kind of dinner," Stiles mumbled from beside me.

Lydia and I gasped, abandoning our notes and narrowing in on Scott's increasingly red face.