Blood Runs Cold

Chapter Eleven

Control was something Stiles continued to have a tenuous relationship with as the days passed. He managed to not wolf out in the middle of class, but more often than not Malia had to force him down to the boiler room the moment the final bell rang for the day. It was then that he'd lose control, as if the wolf was making up for all the time it had been forced back in the day. Scott had been there the first time but it turned out having an alpha who wasn't his own there just made things worse.

Yeah, he could have called Peter. Every time he felt the twinges of rage build up in his chest, Peter's words rang in his head. The reminders that if he just called his alpha and listened to his voice, the irrational rage would start to dissipate. But to Stiles, it felt like an admission that he couldn't control himself.

He also didn't want to give Peter the ability of being the only one to bring him back from the precipice of instability. That was dangerous, more leverage for Peter to have over him.

He'd have asked Chris, but he wasn't sure how well he was hanging on. The answer was probably either the extreme of barely restraining himself from ripping apart everyone in his apartment complex or its partner, fucking fantastic thank you, I'm Christopher Argent and I have everything under control by my sheer force of will. Either way, Chris would doubtlessly have been unable to help bring him back to his senses.

So, with Scott and both of his, ugh, his packmates out of the option, Malia became the one to keep watch over him in the boiler room with Scott and Isaac waiting outside. That was the situation he found himself in, nearly two weeks after he had been bitten.

Stiles' claws dug deep gouges into the concrete wall and he snarled at Malia. He could hear the pounding of feet and the loud, excited noises of teenagers leaving school for the weekend. It drove him nuts, the wolf in his brain interpreting it as the noises of prey and the human screaming as his senses were overloaded by all of the noise.

It was worse that day, maybe because he had been subjected to it for four other days before, maybe because it was nearly the full moon, and Stiles felt damn near feral. He was so close to snapping, felt the urge to rend flesh from bone until the overwhelming noises stopped. The only thing that held him back was the way he forced himself to focus on the sound of the erratic beat of Malia's heart.

He wanted to make a joke about how the tables had turned since he had been the one to keep watch over her during the full moons. The problem was that every time he opened his mouth, all that came out was a nasty snarl. He felt like he had next to no control over his body. The wolf wasn't in control but neither was he.

It was like a full bodied reaction to the sensory overload and Stiles was helpless to stop it. He couldn't even slow down his breaths to try and ease himself out of the state he was in. Malia said something but Stiles couldn't parse it, it was like her voice was distorted through five different filters.

Stiles' lips peeled back from his teeth as his snarl intensified. He knew that he was in his full beta shift, he could feel the prickle off hair that sprouted from his cheeks. He wanted to tell Malia to get out, that he was about to snap. The snarl said that without needing him to speak, but Malia still stayed, matching his snarl with one of her own. She was trying to get him to back down.

It probably would have worked any day earlier that week. He had found out pretty early on that his wolf was easy to bully down into submission and that Malia was great at it. But right then? It wasn't his wolf in control, wanting to hunt down all of the vulnerable humans making prey-like screeches. No, it was every single cell of his body protesting the noise, the humans, the not-pack-wolves and not-wolf-girl, and the way he was trapped away from the sky and the stars and the moon.