Becoming A True Alpha (Teen Wolf)

Chapter 15: When The Dead Come Knocking

Chapter 15

Being awoken in the middle of night with a history textbook still planted in my lap, I have only a moment or two to regain my composer. Seconds rather before the sound of nails scraping across the hardwood echoes through the apartment's hallway.

When the bus had arrived back in town and I was forced to step back onto Beacon Hills soil, I was left with one choice. To go home or to go running back to my father. But that itself was a choice I wasn't ready to make either. What was home to me? Was it the prison of an apartment I had grown accustomed to in the past month? Or was home the two bedroom ranch house awaiting me on the other side of town?

You see, I have no definition of what a real home is. I had never spent more than a few months in each town my mother's job beckoned her to. I thought Beacon Hills could be my home, but now all I see it as is a empty grave, waiting to be filled. I couldn't even be promised the chance that my mother would appear, as if she had been hiding in her study for the past month, and take us away with her job once again.

So I chose the latter. A latter that involved walking back through the doors of this apartment and greeting Deucalion with an apology. But I hadn't passed through the threshold of a lush apartment with fine furniture and plenty of counter space. No, I had walked right back through the doors of a prison with my hands held high in surrender and my weapon on the floor.

Now security paced the hallway outside my bedroom door. Like a guard dog who hadn't had their nails trimmed, Kali's feet click across the wooden planks. If Deucalion had her on daughter patrol, it meant he needed to keep something from me. And judging by the subtly in which Kali paces with, he wasn't trying too hard to keep that something a secret.

I do the one thing that goes against all my instincts. I carefully lay my head back down on the lush pillow case and wait for my breathing to return to a steady pace. Until I can give the woman in the hallway with sensitive hearing the impression that I had fallen back asleep.

The scraping fades to a faint rasp and Kali's putrid scent of confidence and expensive perfume drifts off. I am all but about to crawl out of bed and begin devising a plan. A plan that very well could involve leaping twenty stories with praying as my only tool of survival. Then a familiar voice surfaces. "Kali, let me take it from here." Ethan's soothing tone hardly falters with the great distant it has to reach my ears. A grunt of refusal allows him to further his argument. "You've been through a lot lately, losing Ennis and having to put up with Lucy. You could use the break."

The apartment stays silent for quite some time. But despite the lack of noise I can still picture Kali as she taps her untrimmed nails against the hard wood floor, a quizzical look showing in the creases of the woman's forehead. "I guess it wouldn't hurt to go check on Deucalion."

"Take a shower while you're at it."

Long gone, her responding laugh echo's through the apartment. It is followed but the sound of running water bursting from a tap.

I don't have to imagine the triumphant grin pressed across Ethan's face, because he comes barging through the door seconds later. The boy presses a finger to his lips, which have fallen back into a loose scowl.

Despite every praise I want to give Ethan, it goes against the character I've worked hard to portray."It's a good thing I don't sleep naked," I decide on as the empty words drip in sarcasm.

The boy does not laugh, hardly even grins. "You don't sleep to begin with." He lowers the very finger that was pressed against his lips and taps it twice over the spot where I would be able to find his beating heart. "Your pulse has been drumming through the walls of this apartment for hours."