Grievances (Book Three Of Hale Wolves For Teen Wolf :))

ch. 8: Visionary

Cora and I were telling the story of our old life to Stiles, and I was looking out the window to the rain when I told him about Derek and Peter hiding in the root cellar.

"They were there for two days, waiting, hiding. That's what we're taught to do when the hunters find us . . . hide and heal."

"Okay, so is two days standard, then, or are we thinking Derek's on, like, some extended getaway?" Stiles asked.

I turned to face him. "Why do you care?"

"Why do I care?" Stiles repeated. "Let's see . . . because over the last few weeks, my best friend's tried to kill himself. His boss nearly got ritually sacrificed. A girl that I've known since I was three was ritually sacrificed. Boyd was killed by Alphas. I--do you want me to keep going? 'Cause I can, all right? For, like, an hour."

"You think Derek can do anything about that?" I asked.

"Well, since he's the one everyone seems to be after, it's more like he should do something about it, yeah."

"I don't know," Cora said, looking down at the table. "There's something different about him now. He wasn't like this when I knew him."

"What was he like?"

We heard Peter stop on the spiral staircase. "A lot like Scott, actually." He continued down the stairs. "A lot like most teenagers. . . unbearably romantic, profoundly narcissistic, tolerable really only to other teenagers."

"And so what happened?" Stiles asked. "What changed him?"

"Well, the same thing that changes a lot of younger men . . . a girl."

"You're telling me some girl broke his little heart? That's why Derek is the way he is?"

Peter looked toward me, and then to Stiles. "Do you remember Derek before he was an Alpha, had blue eyes like Tara's? Do you know why some wolves have blue eyes?"

"I just always thought it was, like, a genetic thing."

"If you want to know what changed Derek, or even Tara for that matter, you need to know what changed the color of their eyes."

*

"Okay, so if Derek was a sophomore back then, how old was he?" Stiles asked after Peter started to tell us the story of a girl named Paige. "How old were you? How old are you now?"

"Not as young as we could have been, but not as old as you might think," Peter non-answered.

"Okay, that was frustratingly vague," Stiles said, then looked back to me and Cora. "How old are you?"

"I'm not telling you," I said stubbornly.

Cora rolled her eyes, saying, "I'm 17."

Stiles looked from me to Peter. "See, that's an answer. That's how we answer people." I raised my eyebrows as he looked back at me. "You're gonna punch me again if I keep talking to you like you're a little girl, aren't you?" I nodded once. "Okay, then. Oh, and by the way, my dad already told me you're 15 when he arrested Derek."

I sat back further in the chair as Cora said, "Well, 17 and 15 how you'd measure in years."

"All right, I'm just gonna drop it." He looked to Peter. "What happened to Derek and the cello girl?"

"What do you think happened?" Peter replied. "They were teenagers. One minute it's, 'I hate you, don't talk to me'. The next, it's frantic groping in any dark corner they could manage to find themselves alone for five minutes. Their favorite dark corner was an abandoned distillery outside of Beacon Hills."