Still ▸ Teen Wolf [Book Two]

thirty three ; burning blood

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THIRTY THREE;

BURNING BLOOD

Most people would say that the war had ended. When the lunar eclipse had passed, the sun rose, and the parents had been saved, a person would have thought that everything would be better. They would have expected to find a pretty, hopeful 'Happy Ever After' on the very last paragraph to tie up all of the events into a bow. Jennifer Blake had finally succumbed to her wounds, or that's what they assumed considering she had dragged herself off before they ever truly found out; Deucalion was out of Beacon Hills and no longer ravage with murderous intentions; and, everyone was perfectly okay. Kind of.

There was the darkness inside of the four teenagers, the feeling that pressed heavy on their hearts every single moment of the day and seeped into their skin with an invisible ink of poison. Each of them noticed it, but not a single soul bothered to actually make a conversation out of the subject. It seemed wrong to talk about what happened, to actually acknowledge that they had officially submerged themselves, literally, deep into the supernatural world. They would never be able to run away from it. It was permanent, yet overly detrimental in order to save the people they cared about. Allison and Stiles both got their fathers back, Scott was able to hug his mother again, and Sage found a part of herself that had been long hidden beneath the ashes of the Hale house.

However, the war was far from over and there would be no happy, no ever, and an inevitable after. Sage knew that this was only just the beginning, and that there were going to be more things that would try to take away what she had left. She knew that the loose grip she had on herself was slowly slipping, every single day it felt as if she was losing even more of who she was. It was a hidden fear nagging inside of her brain, something that she tried to ignore in hopes that it would go away. The things that she had been raised not to fear haunted her, the urges that she suppressed came out unwillingly, and she was left in a vulnerable state of trying to answer questions that never led to a greater path.

She still remembered her friends burning in the house fire, the heat crawling up her skin and clawing at her throat like she was still suffocating in the fumes. Every time she glanced at someone for too long, whether it be Isaac Lahey or Stiles Stilinski, she would remember back to their figures burning to death, the sounds that pierced her ears as she pounded on the door. Nothing could ever change that, not medication that she was sure Melissa would try to put her on, or even the therapy that she knew Deaton was considering for her. She was stuck with the memories, with the nightmares, and she supposed that's what made everything so hard. She did not have the ability to forget like everyone else.

It seemed almost cliche to go back to school now, but Scott McCall had insisted that they needed to try to be as normal as possible even if he was now a true alpha, Sage Connelly couldn't even find it in herself to touch her friends, Allison Argent and Isaac Lahey were a budding romance, the two twins that had made it their original purpose to kill the town were now residing in it, and Stiles Stilinski was questioning everything that he once thought was right.

So, all of the teenagers were back in the hallways of Beacon Hills High, where at one point there was a flock of birds that had committed a mass suicide, Aiden had gotten suspended for the use of a vehicle in the building, Sage Connelly has gotten in fights with Stiles Stilinski in, Scott McCall has promised to be a better student in, and where Lydia Martin nearly died in. Their first half of junior year was proving to be ephemeral, it already having gone by so fast.

It wasn't finished yet, though, because another issue was about to rise in the very building that had grown up with their supernatural atrocities. Scott McCall had walked into the high school, Stiles Stilinski falling on his shoulder as the two grinned at each other. From where they were standing, they could easily see Allison and Isaac come walking down the stairs with equal smiles on their face.