From Ashes ✗ Stiles Stilinski - Chapter 49: Chapter 49

Maddie teetered at the edge of consciousness, and it was hard to be awake. When time came to her in hyper-realistic bursts, other things weren't real anymore. Watching her brother's stupid video games, breaking her arm outside the castle in Scotland, taking a bus to yet another monster-filled town...the more she fought sleep, the less real her world became.
Did those other passengers ever call 9-1-1? The thought rattled around in her skull and evaporated as her vision dimmed.
When she drifted from consciousness, Sunnydale became the dream- or nightmare, actually. The cautionary tale made to keep children up at night, hiding their tiny faces half beneath a blanket as if it could shield the entire world. It was a story made to keep little girls awake, asking themselves if these horrors would happen to their home too.
The double-edged sword that it was, the story kept her from drifting away. If Sunnydale was real, then she was real. Whatever was down here had to lose in order for Maddie to exist as she was. Slayers were chosen and won the day while The First Evil and its army lost the battle. A town crumbled to nothing, dying in order for the world to live.
Then again, Sunnydale wasn't just a town where terrible things happened. Demons were a symptom of this diseased, undying thing. It lured its prey, nourished itself on their evil, and kept their graves in its garden - more a cage than a place of rest. Whatever was here, they were as much prisoners as Maddie and her friends, rattling the bars on their cells backwards and forwards in time. They, along with their ancient, unending captor, would never go gently into that good night. They stewed. They remembered. They made sure everyone remembered.
Maddie was awake, lodged somewhere in the hellmouth's throat for all she knew.
She remembered everything, starting with the dead, but it was a different sort of remembering. Shadows in the fog, beckoning her, spinning around her in a grim dance.
A woman's face she knew from old photos, even if she couldn't place where she saw them. In the photos, she smiled at a man and cleaned counters in a strange shop. Maddie's head spun and in the fog, the same woman laid atop rubble, another broken piece of a town crumbling as her body lay there, split in half. Severed spine, arm falling away from shoulder, blood - so much blood flowing from the long, diagonal cut.
Maddie reached through her clouded thoughts, and there formed another shadow. A man with eyes like ice and an angular face she didn't know. Someone violent with blood trailing him. A man that made the earth collapse under him; the only one to wound the beast.
Not a man, though. Something dead and cold. She could feel it on the inside, in her blood and bones. Dead and cold, with no right to know love. Something burning, laughing, and disintegrating as light ate at him from the inside.
Was there anything here besides ugly death?
Maddie fell some time ago, hitting the ground from at least a ten-foot drop and hauled up by her neck, choking and wheezing. A hand gripped her ankle and dragged for ages below the dim, flickering lights. The concrete scraped against her cheek and the gravel was catching in her hair. Caleb wasn't the one who dragged her - at least, he couldn't have been. He walked beside her and spoke with gusto, but she was sure that he wasn't talking to her. He sounded like he was quoting something, his words coming out practiced and measured and his tone rising.
She thought of Sunday school and it shocked her that she still had those memories. A wave of Indiscernible hymns and prayers she didn't quite understand and frilly dresses she hated followed a rolling, intense nausea. A flash of a thought, gone the moment it arrived.
Caleb hummed a hymn, and then it didn't sound like Caleb at all. It was a sad, light humming under his words, coming from somewhere else - maybe everywhere, bouncing off the bare walls. Maddie couldn't tell if it was ahead of them or behind or in her head.
"Why are there so many songs about rainbows..." the voice sang, scratchy and thinning. A simple song; a simple melody as if made for a child but underneath shook with a mocking and bitter defiance. Despite everything, the voice itself was soothing and familiar. "...and what's on the other side?"
The clawed hand gripped Maddie's neck so tightly that she couldn't breathe as it hoisted her off her feet and slammed back first into a freezing wall. She didn't have time to react as the hand let go and other hands gripped her limbs from behind her - from the wall.
"Rainbows are visions, but only illusions..." Coughing. A loud hacking cough from right beside Maddie. The cough slowly faded into a wheezing laugh. "Rainbows have nothing to hide."
Caleb no longer stared at Maddie but to her right with a grimace like he'd swallowed something rotten. Maddie craned her neck as far from the wall as she could. There, covered in sweat and dirt and blood was Sadie, blonde hair matted to her neck and face and a wispy smile on her lips. A gnarled but ever-growing weed in his garden. Sadie grinned over at Maddie and started laughing again quietly. "Fancy meeting you here."
"Now, this is what I like to call killing two birds with one stone. Or one bird, really. Different sides, same coin. Justice..." He looked at Maddie through narrowed eyes, his voice a condescending, and turned to Sadie with the same look. "...and vengeance. Spitting in the face of both man and demon kind, stepping outside your means and thinking you're better than both- but, really, what else would I expect from a woman?"
"Probably not to be killed by one," Sadie choked out with a grin, "but here we are."
Caleb didn't hesitate to backhand Sadie the moment the words left her mouth as Maddie pulled against the hands holding her. There was a slight pause before Sadie laughed again, this time harder. "Oh, wow! That was a guess!"
"Stupid, stupid girl. You'll bleed out nice and slow while I scoop out your innards and hang 'em like tinsel. I will make your death look like art ." His hand gripped Sadie's face while his fingers dug into her cheeks but, in a blink, his head snapped in Maddie's direction and her whole body tensed, steeling itself for a similar blow. Caleb grinned and turned back slowly. "Your friend's afraid to die, martyr act withstanding. What's your excuse?"
Sadie snapped her jaw at him like a feral dog, and Caleb laughed as his hand shot back. Sadie's eyes were bleary and half-lidded but set on the man.
"It's kill or be killed out there, father. All we're doing is dying 'til there's nothing left to kill." She nodded to Maddie in a strange and sudden moment of solidarity that Maddie didn't quite understand. "Me and her? We're not done dying yet."
"No...I suppose you're not. There's something left in the tank, as they say." He sounded like a teacher having a heart to heart with them - more specifically, with Sadie. Almost kind for a moment, and maybe this was what he thought of as a kindness. "Still, whether it's here or in your little Beacon town, you don't have a whole lot of time left. Not with the war."
He folded his hand behind him again and turned his back on them both, walking just out of Maddie's vision. There, like a curtain pulled back for the second act of a play, were at least a dozen shadows, all the same shape and all with glowing eyes. They were looking at something on the floor, a person. A boy struggling to stand.
"Scott!" The sound tore out of Maddie's throat and she pulled against the restraints. The shadows took shape, and she remembered them from the vision Caleb showed her and from her earliest nightmares. Ugly, gnarled creatures with claws and pointed ears and skin which deteriorated so much over the centuries, thinning to scraps around the knives they had for teeth and their sunken in yellow eyes. "What..."
"Turok'hans, if you must know. My favorite of earth's creatures. Blood-thirsty little critters, but you know that."
"Vampires," Maddie spit, shaking her head. "They can't...they don't have souls. We shouldn't see them. There's nothing left of them."
"Nothin' but me," Caleb said and Maddie's eyes returned to him. Maybe she was concussed or all of this made it harder to think straight - either way, she couldn't grasp his words.
He crouched down to the dirt floor and reached for something Maddie couldn't see. When he stood again, he extended his arm at an angle slightly above his head like a tree branch with an ornament hanging from the tips of his fingers. He smiled as the item that hung there glinted in the dim light. Panic engulfed Maddie, and she struggled against the hands holding her, frantic and needing to check her pocket.
Buffy's cross hung from Caleb's fingers by its silver chain before he maneuvered his arm around to allow it to drop into his palm. He was staring at it and smiling still for a horrible minute. It shouldn't have affected her like this. It shouldn't have mattered this much. It shouldn't have felt like he took something from her. She shouldn't have been holding her breath.
Caleb tipped his palm slightly, and dirt fell from it. Dirt or dust or- Her throat constricted. The rest of it fell from his hand and he wiped the remains on his pant leg. The cross vanished and Maddie stared at the ashes it left, unable to differentiate between them and the dirt already there. Cold permeated her entire body, all the way through.
His eyes lifted from his hands to Maddie. "I remember everything. All of it. They're my memories. I remember how glorious their destruction was when they killed your kind. I remember the screams of your friends..."
Maddie felt sick as she remembered the version of Buffy she'd seen in the library earlier, or maybe just the piece Buffy left behind there. Her memory yanked her into the scene from the top of the stairs. An empty town crumbling and people she would never know dying. She remembered the cross and Buffy's broken voice, a point that had to have been years before that. She wondered how much this town chipped away from Buffy.
"I particularly remember that satisfying squish when I pressed my thumb through your Watcher's eye socket."
Maddie's head darted up. The need to vomit wasn't the only thing she felt in her stomach suddenly, like something massive and heavy had pushed it aside. Whatever it was, she could feel it surfacing, rising through her gut and her chest; something she felt the moment Allison had threatened her life, but more than that. Something darker, something that she fought every day not to think about.
Then she thought about Xander. None of them really enjoyed listening to Xander, because he was clueless and clumsy and really did not understand how to be a Watcher. Terra and Em complained the most about him, and she never really understood why. Xander was already a mainstay in her life long before he was officially her watcher. He was always the one to break the bad news. Once Buffy...once she left and kept leaving, there was Xander who told jokes and didn't think video games or board games were dumb and would high five her every time she did marginally well during training, especially after she'd just gotten yelled at by Kennedy. He was the one to listen, even if she had nothing to say.
And he'd always just had the eye patch. He'd always just had the one eye. It was still new when she was eight and would see him get frustrated at a keyboard suddenly. Sometimes, she would see him run into something - a soft shoulder check. Willow would guide him around a space he wasn't familiar with.
She never asked. No matter how badly she wanted to know, she never asked. Part of her was always afraid to know. Now, she wondered about that day. Caleb was grinning down at the thumb on his right hand like it was a prize.
Something was boiling under her skin. Something inside her wanted to beat him until there was nothing left.
He chuckled. "Felt like warm jello afterward- but I digress."
Caleb looked her dead in the eye, crouching like she was a child. She barely knew this man but she wanted him dead and, somewhere deep down, that terrified her. Despite it all, she pulled against the hands gripping her limbs.
"Are you really that surprised? You standing in a basement that no longer exists? Somewhere in a giant hole in the ground?" he asked, narrowing his eyes even while his voice sounded almost whimsical. She clenched her jaw. "You asked who's remembering this place. Well, it's me . It's the kids your Slayer friend was too busy to save. Friends, families, sworn enemies. The hellmouth provides the rest. It sees us all for what we are, in the end."
There was something behind Caleb. A shadow, then another. Maddie couldn't see the one over his right shoulder with him in the way, but the one over his left was directly in front of her and taking shape. She could already recognize the dark hair and the cross around her neck. She recognized the quarter moon cut across its neck. The name wasn't there, but the feeling was. Buffy remembered this girl, this moment.
The girl's mouth was moving, making the same shapes repeatedly. Maddie wanted to get Sadie's attention and turned to the girl who no longer looked amused. Her mouth was slightly open and her eyes were wide, her eyebrows crumpling. She looked distant, transplanted into another moment, maybe another life. Maddie still couldn't see what she was staring at.
Her eyes went back to the girl in front of her; the one she was less and less convinced was Miss Morrell. The moment was a conversation in the back of Buffy's mind as she ran to the library, knowing the worst had happened before she even saw it.
Caleb chuckled. "As for you girls, well...you can't remember where you've never been."
Something dawned on Maddie, a moment of clarity. It felt like the dream she kept having, running through the dense forest, terrified and stopping right at the edge of the trees and finding nothing but an open field. Caleb's words had cleared something in her head.
He turned back to the Turok'hans that were surrounding Scott. "Kill him."
☽ † ☾
When Stiles ever imagined following Lydia Martin into a bedroom, he never in his life thought it would be in a haunted house that didn't exist anymore while they attempted to flee for their lives - which, he reminded himself, might have been just as nonexistent at that point.
They'd run into the room that had been the furthest away from the chaos of the rest of the house - like it'd save them. Like the house was anything but falling into literal pieces behind them. Worse, flaking off like dead skin. Falling away silently to what it was before - nothing. The shadow that was dragging its limbs behind them was soundless, but that might've just been to him. It was just like before with the woman on the couch. He kept wanting to tell himself to wake up or pinch the skin on his arm like in the movies because it had to be a dream. Nothing like this was possible.
Once the door slammed shut, it felt like it vacuumed out all the sound. No, that wasn't right. He couldn't hear if that thing outside the door was making noise before either - no words, no footfalls, no sounds, human or otherwise. He couldn't hear the woman downstairs speaking, even when Lydia could. The only noise had been the door shattering and their own steps and his breathing.
Still, it was loud down there. It was loud all around him as they ran, but in a way that he couldn't explain. It felt loud, but maybe just on the inside. Maybe it was his head that was loud and full and frantic.
Not now, Stiles. Breathing exercises.
What was the most alarming thing was how it stopped the moment the door shut. He leaned against an indentation carved into the door and took a sharp breath, holding it for a few seconds. His heart was still pounding in his chest like it was trying to escape; he could feel it at the base of his throat and wished he could swallow it back down. The quiet and the calm of the room were helping even though he didn't want them to. Nothing about this was quiet or calm or sane, and he would not let anything here convince him otherwise.
He pushed off from the door and turned around slowly. The room itself was large and clean, filled with earthy colors that he could almost identify if not for the dark. It wasn't so dark that he couldn't see anything, though. The light outside the window was dim and blue, but present. It washed the room in blue, making the dust that floated in the light look almost ethereal.
It was the antithesis of the rest of the house. While he felt attacked and exposed downstairs like the house saw inside of him and chose the most painful thing to show, something about the bedroom he stood in seemed comfortable. Not better, not happier, but...like that was okay.
There was only one real flaw - the window. There was a hole in the glass; a jagged and sharp circle to the outside while a sliver of light danced on the edges. Something about it drew him in the same way as the more macabre part of his dad's job. He wanted to look away, but he was already walking towards it.
"She gave us a spell," Lydia said, her voice the only genuine sound in the room, "so, in theory, we should be able to use it."
"Right. Yeah." The words left his mouth without a thought as he reached the window, a sudden weight forming in his gut. "The spell."
"...Stiles?"
He heard Lydia's voice but couldn't focus on it, the noise in his head becoming static that buzzed over everything. The hole in the window was almost perfectly circular; he felt the need to reach out to it, to find out if it was real or some anomaly.
"Stiles, what are you doing?"
"It's so small," he muttered but the words didn't feel like his. He lightly touched a jagged edge of the window. Just as he felt it prick the pad of his index finger, the static in his head seemed to clear and move to his skin. He inhaled sharply as he saw something and, worse, heard a voice.
"Your hands smell of death."
The sound made him jump and stumble back but his legs tripped over something on the floor and he fell to the carpet. He instinctively scooted away from whatever he tripped over and propped himself up on his forearms to see what it was.
There was a girl there in all blue, lying on the floor, limbs splayed and - the one thing that stood out to him the most - a dark hole in her chest. Her hair covered her face but he didn't need to see her face to know what she looked like. This wasn't the same woman he saw on the couch downstairs; this was someone else who died in this house, and he already knew what she looked like.
The voice returned, and he recognized it this time, but only vaguely. It was feminine but layered with something deeper, something growling. A shadow fell over him and the girl on the floor. "Did you cut the throat? Did you pat its head?"
He looked up to see the silhouette of a girl, different from the one at his feet. Smaller, thinner, sunken in, and her face shadowed completely. The same shadow that the creature outside the bedroom door was made of - a deep, permeated darkness. Less of a shadow and more of a hole into nothingness. The girl grabbed something from the vanity and before Stiles could see what it was; she threw it right above his head. He ducked as he heard it crash into the wall behind him, the sound almost like glass breaking but louder and fuller.
He could see the shadowed woman's jaw move as she continued shouting. "The blood dried on your hands, didn't it?"
He scrambled away from the shadow in front of him and the dead girl on the floor. It kept shouting and, for a moment, he felt like a child stuck with a memory of his mother he didn't want to remember. Not his mother, though, not really - just what was left. "You were stained. You still are."
Stiles backed up so far that his back and head slammed into something solid and a large, leather-bound book toppled into his lap. He grabbed the book, meaning to toss it aside and get up but his entire body tensed and he gripped the book tighter. His vision was fading, blinking out into blackness when he heard the shadow's voice again, but softer, kinder.
"I know what it's like. You think you matter," echoed the quiet.
Stiles could still feel the carpeted floor underneath him and the bookcase behind him, but the world had become pitch black and cold in a way his head couldn't completely understand or latch onto. He had nothing, no way to get back, no spell. He wondered for a moment if this was what death felt like.
He could hardly remember anything outside of this place, and it made him more angry than sad. More angry than anything, really.
"I just wanted to help," Stiles whispered, more to himself than the voices. His voice wavered and that made him angry, too.
He wanted to be good enough. He needed to know that this was good enough. He needed to do something. To be useful. The darkness remained stagnant, and it almost felt like a vice. This isn't real. Something's trying to scare you. Don't let it scare you, Stiles.
"You think you're a part of something..." The voice spread like a dark cloud of ink engulfing his head.
Don't let it scare you. It doesn't know you. It can't know you.
"It's like the whole world is moving, but you're stuck." A voice turning rage into a kind of inside joke as fear bloomed from its center. "Like those animals in the tar pits."
The words reverberated in his chest and head, something inside him cracking open. The echoed, steady beeping of the heart monitor and the long second just before it went from a series of beeps to one long, endless sound filling his ears. Before the monsters. Before the blood and gore and bodies.
There was the silence of the hospital room, a mother's grip loosening, and that long, droning beep. Proof that anyone could die at any time. His dad, Scott, Maddie, Lydia. There and gone.
"It's like you just keep sinking a little deeper every day, and nobody even sees!"
"I just wanted-" Stiles's words sank into nothing and, again, there was no echo. Wherever he was now - wherever he was trapped - was getting smaller.
"Things fall apart. They fall apart so hard." A new woman's voice mimicked the same feeling he felt when he entered the room he now wondered if he was still in. Comforting. Empathetic. Reaching out. "You can't ever put them back the way they were. There's just so much to work through."
Every other voice he'd heard didn't sound concrete; they sounded like they were on the scanner in his dad's patrol car, only without the static. Pieces of conversations and moments and all he could do was listen to them happening. This voice didn't sound as disembodied; it felt like it was coming from an actual human being, someone seated on the floor next to him.
"It sees you." The woman's voice sounded more and more concrete. "Everything that's happened. Everything that still can."
There was no answer from another voice, and a long silence followed. Stiles swallowed, still unable to see. "Are...are you talking to me?"
"I'm so sorry." It wasn't necessarily an answer to his question and left him wondering. Even when he wanted to ask again, instead he let her continue. "You found something you weren't supposed to find. A fragment. A connection."
Something about this sent a wave of panic and anger through him as it tethered him back to his life. "Look, I don't want a connection! I want to get the hell out of here!"
There was a pause, longer than he expected, and it made him think she had left and he was alone again.
He swallowed. "I want...I wanna find my friends. Are they okay? Are we alive, any of us?"
"The connection is still here."
"What connection?" he snapped and immediately regretted it.
"You already know that." It was the first direct answer she gave him and it startled him a little. "Your past, like ours, is a road you walk between two worlds. It's here it must split."
He wasn't sure if she was giving him instructions or if this was a disjointed rendition of a Robert Frost poem. Either made him more confused than before. "How does that even make sense? We're wasting time! Just-"
"One road leads and ends here." There was a pause, like the rest of the words she needed to speak were hurting her. "The other saves your friends today-"
"Fine," Stiles answered, cutting her off. Cold, endless fear tightened the coil in his stomach, but it didn't matter. Time was running out. It came as a shock to his senses when he thought of Scott, then Maddie, and then Lydia. Even Sadie, if she was alive still. "I'll do it."
"The other saves them, but there's a price," she said, her voice sad but firm. "Magic always has a price. Your world will never be what it was meant to be. There will be a scar. When the door opens, the price will be paid in threefold."
There was a lump in his throat and he thought about his friends lost somewhere in this hell. There was no telling what they were seeing or what was happening to them. There was no telling what type of 'connections' they made. "If I take that road, can we get out of here? All of us?"
There was a pause again. When she spoke this time, it sounded like defeat. "Yes."
"Then it doesn't matter." He had to reassure himself that this was the right thing to do. He kept telling himself that they could fight whatever happened next. No one would die today. There was a moment of tense silence before he said, "What do I do?"
"You have everything you need. All you need to do is say the words."
"The words? What wor-" It was a knee jerk reaction, clenching his fist. He felt something crunch in his hand. Even though he couldn't see, his eyes widened. He looked to his side where he heard the voice coming from, but darkness still covered everything. He could feel someone there, looking back at him, and he could feel a wash of something indescribable. Something past sadness, something bigger than that. He thought about the woman downstairs on the couch and the girl on the floor. He wondered if she was one of them or someone else entirely. "Why are you the only one acknowledging that we're here?"
"I'm not."
Stiles tried to shake off the uneasiness that gave him.
Something about that made Stiles' feel guilty for asking. He couldn't imagine what this person might've suffered in all of their time here, or even fathom what they'd gone through to get here. He wanted to know, though; he wanted to know who in this literal hellhole would help them and still had the mental faculties to speak. "Who are you?"
"You already saw who I was," she said. She didn't elaborate (not that he expected her to) and the silence felt like it had weight. Stiles thought back to the woman downstairs in the body bag and on the couch, then to the woman on the second floor, by the bed, with a hole in her chest. "You felt the pain that it caused. That's enough."
His throat dried up. He thought he could hear it - the shot ringing out, the glass breaking. A body collapsing. A woman's wailing, aching sobs.
Nothing magical. Nothing supernatural. No demons or wolves or kanimas. A bullet did this. The woman didn't speak for a long time. Stiles was actually afraid that he'd upset her after a long moment of nothing.
He took in a slow breath, remembering the paper in his hand. He knew already, in the back of his head, that the next thing he said would be the end of this conversation. Time was short and there was none left to waste.
Before he could reply or begin to think on her words, time ripped away from him. His vision cleared, flickering in and out as the weighted feeling in his chest lifted and he felt like he could breathe again. In fact, he took a large, gasping breath in as he clutched his chest. He could feel the sweat on his brow and the sensation of static on his skin.
Lydia was rushing to his side before he could process anything else. "What happened?!"
"...everything you need," he mumbled as the woman's words staggered in and out of his memory. "...door is open..."
He shook his head wildly and looked over at Lydia, her eyes wide and her brow creased in concern. He unclenched his fist and heard the crunch of paper there.
"All you need to do is say the words."
His eyes lit up as they shot over to the paper in his hand and fumbled to unfold it. WIth Hebron's Almanac Binding Spell scrawled at the top, the rest looked like gibberish, clunky syllables squashed together. He didn't even have his phone to translate any of it.
"Stiles!"
He looked back up at Lydia. "She said all we have to do is say the words."
"Who?"
"The girl that-" The confused look on Lydia's face stopped him. "Wait, you didn't hear her? You didn't hear any of that?"
Her eyes narrowed incredulously. "I am hearing a lot of things right now so I'm not really differentiating at the moment!"
"You weren't wondering who I was talking to for a whole five minutes?" he asked.
"You weren't talking to anyone," she said, her voice becoming more and more annoyed. "You touched the window, freaked out, and tripped. That literally just happened just now."
Stiles stared at her, gaping for a second before looking all around the room and the ceiling. "Seriously?!"
"Could you stop shouting at the wallpaper for a second so we can figure out how to get out of here?"
"That depends." His gaze shot back to hers as he held up the piece of paper. "Please tell me this is Latin and that you can speak it as well as you translate it."
Her eyebrows furrowed as she snatched the paper from him and smoothed it out enough to read. "If we survive this, I'm making it clear to all of you I didn't take Archaic Latin to be your personal translator."
Her eyes were scanning over the words rapidly as she mouthed something under her breath.
"I don't think we have to translate it. We just have to speak it," he said.
"You mean at the same time?"
"It can't hurt to have more than one person saying it, right?"
There was a long, loud scratching noise at the door. They both turned to it, Stiles jumping at the sudden sound. Lydia's voice wavered a little as she asked, "And you're sure this will work?"
He turned back to the paper in Lydia's hands, but something else caught his eyes at the window. Someone was standing in front of it.
She appeared just like she did on the floor, but her face was in shadow. The woman in all blue with a red splotch on her chest and her hair hanging neatly to her shoulders. Her face angled down and the shadow across her face like a black mask as she stayed mute. He tried to imagine her face but couldn't see it, couldn't remember it from the moment he'd seen her on the floor.
Stiles nudged Lydia, and she turned back to him but jumped when she caught sight of the woman. At least she could see her now, and he didn't feel as crazy. He stopped trying to imagine her face and started trying to imagine where her gaze was going. There was a chance it was on them, but that didn't make sense with the angle of her head. She was probably looking at the ground. He followed her gaze and noticed the space on the carpet was no longer empty.
There was a large circle and a design at its center. On the thick line that the dark ring made, were precariously placed lit candles at every point that the design in the center met the circle. He looked back up at the shadowed woman. "Yeah, I'm sure."
A thunderous slam echoed in the room from the door, and he knew they were out of time.
"Lydia, start reading."
"Terra, vente, ignis et pluvia," she said and Stiles echoed clumsily. "Cunctate quattuor numina, vos obsecro."
Thunder so loud that he couldn't hear anything over it shook the house and he struggled to stay on his feet.
"Defendete nos a recente malo resoluto." Lydia said it like it was second nature. Stiles said it like his tongue swelled in his mouth but pushed through to the end. "Omnia vasa veritatis!"
A flash of lightning lit up the entire house as thunder struck again. The screaming from outside the door began and made him feel like his ears were bleeding. Stiles looked up at the girl at the window as the light from the lightning didn't fade but got brighter. He squinted as he saw a girl with gentle features and painfully sad eyes smiling at him softly.
A thought overtook him suddenly, and he looked at her in horror.
"One more thing!" he shouted as loud as he could. "We need one more thing!"
The light blinded him shortly after.
☽ † ☾
The earth shook and the pressure on Maddie's limbs and waist eased slowly. The creatures surrounding Scott grasped their heads as if something was hurting them. Maddie looked back at Caleb and saw that he was also grasping his head. The shaking stopped and he looked dizzy, unfocused as the hands that had restrained Maddie and Sadie let go and shrank back to the wall. The shadowed women that Maddie could now see clearer were still there but looking at the man in between them as the room changed shape, flickering in and out to something she recognized.
"What...what's happening?!" Caleb was blinking rapidly and shaking his head as he looked at Maddie with black pits for eyes. "What did you do?!"
"I don't..." She felt something go through her, a wave of electricity that woke up her nerves and her brain. It was almost clarity.
Sadie took a loud, deep breath as she turned to Maddie. "Did you feel that?"
"What was it?" Maddie asked, rolling her shoulders, one after the other.
"Good, old fashioned, grade A magic." Sadie grinned for a second before shrugging. "Well, grade D. Whatever. Got the job done."
Caleb stumbled toward them, the black of his eyes bleeding down his cheeks. "What did you little bitches do?!"
"Nothing at all, Padre," Sadie said, narrowing her blue eyes on him as the library - the same library Maddie found herself in earlier - took shape around them.
"Actually, I'm doing something right now." Maddie let the flood of his words hit her. You can't remember where you've never been. She looked all around her and up at the sky light. A broken glass ceiling was suspended above their heads. She glanced at the girl with the tight braid that looked like a woman she knew. Buffy ran as fast as she could that night and still found her dead.
Buffy, who experienced things here that Maddie could never fathom. Buffy, whose memory ran right through her. She could still feel it. She could see parts of Buffy's life play out in her head. She wondered about Willow and Xander and Faith; she wondered what this place made of them. "I remember everything. Every terrible thing. This place.."
The beginning and the end. Missionaries slaughtering tribes and slayers beating back the tide of vampires. This was the hellmouth itself, the gnarled root of it which bloomed bloody into a small suburban town.
Yes, she remembered everything. Mostly, she remembered Buffy.
This wasn't forgiveness. This wasn't a pass on everything Buffy had and hadn't done. It wasn't a new beginning for them, but it was something. Understanding, maybe.
The moment she thought the name, time folded in on her. The past crashed into the present and she found herself alert and alive as the look of horror and confusion on Caleb's face turned to rage. He bee-lined for her, hands outstretched to grab her throat.
Something more than her coursed through her veins as she kicked him squarely in the chest and he went flying .
A current of pure, undiluted power coursed through her veins, white hot and pulsing. Unlocking just a piece of it uncaged something in her chest. Words spilled out of her with a confidence she never possessed.
"Do you know what happens when you touch one of those memories, Caleb?" Sheglanced back at Sadie when she said it, hoping that maybe Sadie had experienced something similar. She wasn't limping like Maddie expected when she began to make her way over to Caleb, eyes narrowed on him. "You feel what they felt, see what they saw. You remember."
He was already standing by the time she got over to him and his fist caught her in the jaw. It staggered her for a moment as she heard the growls of the creatures behind her.
With the punch, another flood of images came to her, another burst of power and pain and rage.
"I remember being strong," Maddie said, tasting blood in her gritted teeth. She focused on the memories that weren't hers, the pain of heartbreak and the loneliness destiny brought her. She remembered Xander and Willow and the fear of leaving them behind. She had a passing thought of Stiles, lost somewhere in this place and Allison, who might never come back from the road she'd taken. She thought of how much it hurt to think that she might never make it back home, wherever that was now.
She remembered Buffy's other friends, the ones Maddie never got a chance to meet.
Witches. Demons. Soldiers. Wolves.
A wolf that- Her eyes got wide and she gasped silently. A wolf.
"You were friends with a werewolf?"
"That's a story for another time."
The beginnings of a grin tugged at her bleeding lip. "Time's up. Rules change."
She looked up at the broken glass ceiling and the black sky as the big, bright sphere of light through a blockade of inky clouds. The growling grew louder but she already knew it wasn't from the vampires. Scott bellowed a monstrous howl.
Sadie was humming the same tune as before as she grinned and strode over to the hoard of Turok'hans. She expertly dodged the claws of one and grabbed it by the throat, squeezing until its head left its shoulders. "Leave it to Sunnyhell to save the fun bits for last."
Scott's eyes burned yellow as he slashed through the neck of one of the vampires and it turned to dust at his feet.
Maddie dodged the second hit and caught Caleb's fist before throwing one of her own. Flashes of a fight she never began bleeding into her brain. The whistle of the Scythe slicing through the air met her ears like an old friend. She remembered strikes she never threw and hits she never took. It dawned on her in a flash. Of course.
Of course he fought Buffy.
Her movements became more fluid as she evaded strikes like they were nothing. Fighting hadn't felt this natural - this good - in what might've been years when it was only months. Even if it wasn't the strength and speed she lost and what was there now was Buffy's, it was still hers right now.
It wasn't Buffy's in the scheme of things; it was all of theirs, passed down for centuries all the way back to when demons ruled as gods and a girl was chained to the earth.
Caleb grabbed her throat in one swift move and chuckled. Maddie, struggling for breath, gripped his arm.
"How much of you is a memory, Caleb?" Maddie choked out. She grabbed his extended forearm and forced her weight on the outside of his elbow, causing it to crack. Caleb yelped and let her go. She wheezed as she kicked him in the face with the heel of her boot. "You fought her. Buffy . You tried to kill her."
He booted her in the gut while she was catching her breath, cradling his hyperextended elbow. She flopped to the floor as he laughed. "Killed a few wannabe slayers, too. Can't forget that."
He was right. She could feel them in his grasp, girls who never got the chance to know this power, and then she could feel their lives leaving their bodies. She remembered how much he enjoyed it. She focused on Buffy. She focused on the last fight she had with this man. What had made it different? She kept digging, searching the memory.
"I was never much for preachers," a man's voice said and she instantly recognized it. The younger man from the library.
"Angel."
"Angel?" she whispered to herself as the name reached all the way back to the first memory she experienced. Heartbreak surfaced again, a bottomless pit expanding. His name connected to all of it.
Whoever he was, he was there for this fight. He didn't interfere when she told him not to, watching...as she killed Caleb.
The clarity spread as the sight of Caleb cut in half flashed before her. The memory was so real, so tangible, that she could feel the weapon in her hand.
And then, it found her.
She looked over at her hand and saw it, the red ax and the sharpened stake connected by a sleek silver rod. It wasn't the genuine article because it couldn't be but it existed where she stood now.
Xander told jokes about the hellmouth being directly under the library and the irony of it. This weapon was set right above the opening to the hellmouth in the hands of the most powerful witch she knew and it changed Maddie's whole life.
It warmed in her grasp. She stood and spun it around as Caleb, who stomped towards her, jerked back at the sight.
"All you ever were was a sick bastard killing little girls, then Buffy killed you and you were nothing." Maddie gripped the handle of the Scythe and smiled, hearing the words he yelled at Buffy in her head and spitting them back out at him with a red smile. "Are you ready to finish this, bitch?"
Maddie swung the head of the ax at his gut and he dodged it with little effort but wasn't able to dodge the boot that she smashed into his cheek less than a second later.
She evaded his attacks with little effort and got in a few good hits, including a thundering headbutt that made her vision tilt for a few seconds despite reveling in both the adrenaline and searing pain.
Every ache and cut was worth it for the agony on his face.
He grabbed the handle of the Scythe and, as Maddie attempted to pull it away, rocked her momentum back on her, ramming the solid metal of the handle into her head.
Slightly dazed, Maddie noticed he didn't let go. It wasn't until his body went completely stiff that he released the weapon.
Behind him, gripping him by the back of the neck, was Sadie, eyes blazing and skin sunken in, revealing her true form. When she spoke, her voice sounded layered and distorted on top of giddy. "Have you heard the good news, Father? I remembered something, too. Ask me what."
He didn't and Maddie decided not to attack yet.
She squeezed tighter and thick, black liquid came out the side of his mouth.
Sadie's smile grew so wide, the blood on her teeth could've easily been mistaken for someone else's and her canines could've just as easily transformed to fangs. She was a demon more than a girl, all the way through.
She spun him around and began smashing his face into a stack of books on a table.
Maddie let her go for a little, the only sound left echoing in the nearly vacant space. Maddie felt a presence beside her and expected to see the face of the school therapist but instead she found Scott there, breathing heavily and covered in dust.
He nodded and Maddie nodded back before shouting, "Sadie!"
Her demonic visage had long since disappeared and her human face drowned in anger and grief. She kept going, smashing Caleb's face again and again until it was a mess of skin and blood and bone.
"Sadie!"
Sadie's eyes shot up and she stopped the thrashing on a dime, looking back and forth between Scott and Maddie before rolling her eyes. "Oh, come on. Like you're not enjoying this."
The room began to shake again, wildly, thunder sounding in the distance and lightning following.
Sadie huffed, regarding the earthquake like it was nothing. "Fine."
She threw Caleb aside and he nearly fell but still caught himself, laughing as the flesh and muscle moved in a macabre stop-motion. Maddie grimaced at the sight of his deformed smile. Scott was about to charge, when her hand stopped him and she shook her head. Scott exhaled and took a step back.
Maddie ran forward and ducked his fist, punching him in the gut and kneeing him in what was left of his face as the world around them shook and books leapt from the shelves. Maddie gripped the handle of the Scythe tightly and spun it in the air, the low whistle reaching her ears as she lodged the blade of the ax between Caleb's legs and he yelped.
His black eyes met hers and she smirked. In one smooth movement, she brought the blade up the length of his body until it sliced through his head.
He didn't fall apart immediately and, through everything, still spoke. "I want you to know...whatever I would've done, the death you ran from today...it's nothing . The end is still coming."
Maddie began to see his stitching - or whatever had been holding him together - come loose. Three shadows descended on him, blurs of women that came into clearer view. One with a cut from her shoulder to her hip, one with a smiling gash on her neck, and the last - one she didn't remember seeing before - with a hole through her chest. They were coming for him, she knew. She wanted to watch it happen.
"You know already. You can feel it happening." His two halves, separated by a hair's breadth, were smiling and it made her stomach turn. She didn't look away. "Call it what you want. It never stood for Alpha."
Something about that made her stop for a moment and search for a connection in her head. Her real memories were still unclear and she couldn't find the significance. Panic rose as the shaking grew worse and the lightning lit up the sky.
"The end is comin'," he laughed, he voice hoarse and low. "War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death ride on the morrow. The apocalypse is nigh."
"Sorry, is this a threat or an episode of Supernatural?" Sadie shouted over the noise.
Thunder boomed around them again as he split in two.
"THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING FOR ALL OF YOU!"
Maddie could still hear him scream as the light in the room got brighter and he disappeared into it.
The three women turned to them and the girl with the bullet hole was the first to fade into the shadows. The girl who looked like Miss Morrell stared at her with her hand out. In it, was the same jagged stake she was holding earlier. It was only then that Maddie realized that the Scythe was gone and its absence already made her something lesser. It didn't belong to her.
It belongs to all of us, a voice thrummed in her head that didn't feel like her own and she tried to convince herself that it was her conscience. Even still, it was heavily accented but she couldn't quite identify where it was from.
The girl brought the stake back into Maddie's view and something about that made the moment more painful. There was no way they could leave with that stake or the ashes or any of it. It was for nothing. Maddie tried shaking her head but the girl didn't falter until Maddie reluctantly took the wooden stake.
The girl's mouth moved and the same voice echoed in her head a moment later. "Not the only freak."
Something about this rang too personal as she remembered the girls she roomed and trained with for years. She remembered Terra and Em, Charlie and Nora. She remembered Marie by her side as they walked home from patrols, muscles burning and stomach aching from laughter. The buzz of shared experience bouncing between the six of them like a shared language, sometimes lonely but never alone. The world changed in a way this girl never got to see. It was a whole lot darker but that was a weight carried by thousands now, not just one.
It was easy to forget sometimes.
Maddie's voice was on the verge of cracking as she let herself smile just barely and said, "Not anymore."
The girl smiled back as light engulfed all of them in one last short burst.
☽ † ☾
The sun rose, a ball of fire in the sky as it bled light over the horizon. That was the first thing Maddie saw when she opened her eyes. Reality shot through her brain and she sat up too quickly.
She was on cracked asphalt, which was already warm despite the time of year and how low the sun was. The road broke apart and dropped away to a giant, cavernous pit only a few feet away from her, too deep to see the bottom from here. A hole in the world. She glanced all around her now, finding Scott to her left and Sadie to her right, both stirring and groaning.
The ache of her body found her all at once.
Maddie's heart pounded in her chest as she whispered, "We made it."
The sound of her own voice jolted through her bones. Something about that made a smile stretch over her lips so wide that her cheeks hurt. She was awake. She was alive.
They. Were. Alive .
Even as she sat there, conscious for mere minutes, she struggled to remember things clearly. She remembered a dead snake and a yearbook in the quad, a girl that looked like her guidance counselor, a teenage Buffy crying in the library, and an evil preacher that wanted her dead. Even those things were fading, becoming almost unreachable like dreams.
They were alive, yes, and that was something she was thankful for. Still, they had nothing to show for it. No proof. No ashes. Nothing but dreams and that managed to siphon much of her new-found energy.
She placed her hands on the ground beside her in an effort to unsteadily push herself onto her feet but her right hand didn't find the blacktop.
Instead, she found something smooth and cool and curved to fit her hand. She wished it was the Scythe but she knew better, even before she looked down.
A polished, jaggedly shaped stake was beneath her palm and a chill started in her stomach and spidered up her spine. She picked it up and brought it closer, but as she moved it, her eye caught something shining from further away. Something that caught the sunlight.
Her heart leapt into her throat as she pocketed the stake and maneuvered herself to her hands and knees, crawling over to the dot of reflected sun. It was a dream, she told herself but the story didn't stick anymore.
It wasn't real.
Sunnydale was gone.
Her stare met with the silver cross lying on the asphalt, chain broken and tangled. She looked at it for a long minute, an image of Buffy tearing it from her neck playing on a loop in her head.
"I don't wanna die."
She touched the tiny, vertical beam and released a breath. Gingerly, she picked up the cross and gathered the chain in her palm as she stood up and looked out at the pit known as Sunnydale, California.
It was real, even now. It was alive when it no longer existed. A town of memories and ghosts and pain she couldn't quite fathom, even now. People she cared about had people they cared about who were still there, who still suffered and held enough kindness to make sure no one else would end up like them. Maddie knew that she and the rest of her friends didn't survive; they were saved.
She heard a voice behind her and was thankful to recognize it as Scott's. "Guys...where are Stiles and Lydia?"
The calm and relief that settled in her head and her aching muscles shattered and the blood drained from her face. She spun around, met with Scott's and Sadie's banged up and confused faces. The memory of her friends hit her like slamming into a brick wall. There was no one else left on the ground and Maddie didn't have it in her to peer into the crater behind her.
"Stiles!" Scott shouted, panic rising in his voice. "Lydia!"
Maddie thought to shout too but fear constricted her throat. Her gaze searched around the edge of the pit for specks laying there in the distance. She prayed to deities and whatever had saved them, even if she wasn't sure how much she believed in any of that.
That was when she heard Sadie yell back to them from the top of a slope that the road came from, several yards away.
When her eyes met Scott's, they began running even when Maddie's legs were still getting used to standing again. They both haphazardly ran up the hill, past Sadie, and Maddie caught sight of the blue jeep at the side of the road, upright and unscathed - aside from the damage it had before they left Beacon Hills.
She ran faster and any onlookers might've assumed she and Scott were racing. The wind whipped Maddie's hair around her face and there was dirt in her eyes but she didn't slow.
Her legs pumped harder when she saw two shadows through the windows. The cross was still in her hands and she squeezed tighter and tighter the faster she ran. A thought ran through her head that she would happily give it back, toss it back into the pit, if it meant Stiles and Lydia were alive. She would fight her way back in there and find them.
She nearly ran into the jeep and had to grip the side mirror to stop herself. Inside, she could see Lydia stirring in the backseat, where she sat before all this. Her brows were furrowed and her face had a thin layer of sweat but she was unharmed and moving. Maddie felt a rush of relief as she banged on the glass Lydia was leaning against.
She tried the door but it was locked. Scott was already on the opposite side of the car, doing just about the same and Maddie found herself running over to the other side. In the driver's seat was Stiles, face paler than usual and eyes moving behind closed lids. She started banging on the driver side window along with Scott, both of them shouting "Stiles!" like maniacs.
She could tell he was breathing, but then his chest rose in a jerk, like a hiccup. Both Scott and Maddie stopped shouting and exchanged a worried glance. Then, Stiles jerked slightly again before his eyes shot open and he took in a loud, deep breath like this was his first gasp of air after drowning. The sudden sound wasn't the part that freaked Maddie out the most; it was the fact that when his eyes opened, she didn't see them. Not like there was nothing there, but as if his eyes were pitch black marbles in his head.
Stiles blinked once and the blackness was gone in an instant, although his pupils were massive. He coughed like he actually was drowning and breathed heavily, wheezing from the looks of it. His eyes were unfocused when he slowly looked out the window and jumped when he saw Scott and Maddie there. A cloud of dust went into the air in the car and he coughed some more.
Lydia was coughing too and looking down in disbelief. Maddie frowned for a moment and jumped to see what exactly they were choking on. With no luck, she banged on the window again to get Stiles' attention. His eyes met hers, brighter than she expected in the shadow of the jeep, and - for a long moment - she froze, realizing how tight she clutched the cross in her hand, the one that couldn't possibly be real.
A flash of a memory caught her by surprise - Buffy's memory. The name 'Angel' popped back into her head and the way Buffy said it, both exactly like and unlike she'd said it a thousand times before, made Maddie's chest hurt. Buffy really had been happy to see Angel, despite time and distance. She was always happy to see him, even when the pain of it was overwhelming. She said his name with surprise and relief when she looked at him, a tall man all in black with square shoulders and a mouth that didn't quite know how to smile anymore. Still, he smiled at her the same way he always did and she took a moment to smile back at him. Even at the end of the world.
A grin slowly spread across Stiles's face through the window and she felt something warm in her stomach expand to her chest, all the way up to her face. She felt like an idiot standing there but didn't move or look away. She was too relieved to let anything get to her, even if it just lasted a handful of seconds. A smile tugged at her lips; she let it and that scared her more than anything at the bottom of that pit.
"Open the door," she said, hopefully loud enough for him to hear through the glass. She pointed to the handle and he blinked rapidly like he was snapping out of a trance as he hurried to open the door. She heard the muffled noise of the handle and saw him look over at the pushed down lock. He stopped trying the door and pulled the lock up, then tried again.
The oddest thing happened then.
The door swung open and, before Stiles could even start to get out, sand poured from inside the car, piles of it streaming out and sometimes dropping in clumps. Maddie's senses went back to high alert as both her and Scott took a large step back.
"Could you guys cool it with the super speed next time?" Sadie's voice said in the distance behind them. She neared the jeep and stepped beside Maddie. "Honestly, this piece of junk could've been running and you still would've- ...Whoa."
"Is that dirt?" Scott asked. "Or..."
Maddie knelt down beside the pile of sand at her feet and scooped it up in one hand, letting it fall again. Thinner than sand, less coarse. Almost dust or... Maddie grinned. "Ashes."
☽ † ☾
Three Hours Before
When Max was young and observed the Council meetings on the days where she had nowhere else to be but with her grandfather, it seemed so structured. A place for everything and everything in its place. Even when they clearly had no clue what to do, there was a surety to their voices. They knew that, no matter what, there would be answer and consistently sounded like they knew the answer all along. It was a level of confidence Max strived for, even though she still leaned more toward rambling and ramming through her thoughts like a runaway tank.
At least, in the end, she typically seemed confident, even if it sounded tacked on.
Disappointment weighed heavy on her when she realized that the Council she worked for - the New Watchers' Council - lacked that.
A million questions and complaints flew around her head for the past several hours and she still bit her tongue - sometimes literally, to stop the words from flying out. Especially under her special circumstance, stuck in a car with a woman that did not want to say more than two syllables to her. Her large, black lined eyes stayed on the road, unflinching despite how long they'd been up and how late it was. 3:38, the clock read in glowing green numbers which was the only light for the past twenty minutes at least.
She wasn't on her phone because her phone was only active for the past few hours and there were hardly any apps to use or games to play with the horrible service out in the desert. Even then, none of those things ever kept her attention for very long. She wanted someone to talk to, someone to be excited with. Council aside, she waited for this day since she was a little girl, watching a fresh Academy graduate straighten his tie as he asked her to wish him luck.
She smiled at the man who couldn't have been much older than she was now. "Good luck, Mister Wesley."
"Mister Wyndam-Pryce, Mackenzie." He had knelt down to shake her hand and Max had giggled at how seriously he made the whole ordeal. After she shook his hand, he fell over in an attempt to get back up and quickly stood again, dusting off his blazer and checking that no one else aside from Max had seen that. He smiled down at her and nodded. "...and thank you."
Now she was working for the very slayers he'd been assigned to. He'd met them both, even trained them both when Mr. Giles initially got fired. She still got a bit sad whenever she thought about Wesley. He'd been the very first person outside of her family that she looked up to before he was fired. She was only ten when she overheard her grandfather and the elder Mr. Wyndham-Pryce discuss the terms of his sacking. They didn't even pay his way back to England.
She knew then that she'd never see him again, but she idolized him still - maybe even more than her grandfather. Wesley was like her; neither of them were particularly gifted physically and they both had a tendency to stick their respective feet in their mouths, but they were smarter than most gave them credit for. They had a way with books and magic.
The one thing Max hoped for was the same willingness to do right. She remembered the look in her granddad's eye as she peeked through the door. Wesley's father harrumphed when her grandfather said Wesley helped Buffy even after she disobeyed the council. Even told him the boy fought side by side with a vampire.
"Perhaps...perhaps, we're the ones who are wrong," Max imagined he said and immediately would clear his throat to add, "...sir."
They agreed he wasn't worth the effort or money to bring him back home and Max didn't speak to her grandfather for nearly three weeks.
Sometimes, she still wondered where Wesley Wyndam Pryce had gone off to. She hoped he kept doing good for others and well for himself.
For the first time in hours, she felt the car veer right slowly and carefully. She missed the sign for the most part aside from the deep green of it but she was sure it had said 'Beacon Hills'. She was a bit let down that she hadn't gotten a chance to take a picture of it, even if it was too dark and turned out blurry. She was sure there'd be a day when she would need to remember how excited she was right now. She'd need a reminder of how she was meant for more than a flat in London reading demonology books on the floor of her seat-less sitting room. Today, her future would start and she wanted that documented.
"Are we almost there?" she asked the girl next to her, Terra. Terra didn't answer or side-eye her. Max cleared her throat. "Miss Nunez?"
In one smooth, swift motion, Terra turned on the stereo and it boomed to life with heavy guitar and thunderous drums. Max jumped and clutched at her chest. She tried to calm her breathing and glared at Terra, pursing her lips.
"Could you turn that down?" Max asked but couldn't even hear the question as it left her mouth. "COULD YOU TURN THAT DOWN?"
No response.
Max growled and reached for the volume.
"Touch it and you're walking your happy ass the rest of the way," she spoke loudly without necessarily shouting and that might have annoyed Max more than what she actually said.
Max's annoyance level exceeded her limits in such short order that she still turned the knob down, thrumming metal music becoming a murmur. The car slowed to a stop right in the middle of the road, Terra's expression unchanging. Max's eyes narrowed and she folded her arms. "Lovely. We're almost there anyway. I'm fine to walk."
"Don't get out of the car," Terra replied instantly, locking the doors. "We're here."
Max's forehead scrunched up. "What? What do you mean? We haven't-"
Her eyes flew back to the windshield and grew wide at the sight. Before her was a sign that read 'Welcome to Beacon Hills' in a script font, but just in front of that and closer to the car was a line of people making a barricade all the way across the road. Every single one of them - at least in the double digits as far as sheer numbers - were facing the outside of the city limits and, more specifically, towards the hatchback Max and Terra were in. If Max squinted, and she did, she might've even thought they were smiling.
Max swallowed. "Are they-"
"Yeah. You slayed vampires before, right?"
"I, um- I mean, I...sort of."
"Sort of? How sort of?!"
Max's words died on her tongue.
Terra growled and took the key from the starter as the vampires began to walk towards them.