Chapter 9 — Everyone Comes to a Small Street
They came on Sunday in three cars and a moving truck, and Rosa Delgado watched the entire thing from her front window with a phone in her hand and nobody to call.
Stiles watched it from the porch.
"Okay," he said. "How many is that."
"Six," said Hope.
"That's eleven people getting out of those cars."
"Six family. The rest are — " she squinted. "That's a driver, that's two of Marcel's people who are going to be very annoyed to be here, and that's a woman named Josette who does the wards. She'll be gone by tonight."
"The wards."
"You'll see."
The first one out was a woman in a long coat who did not look at the house at all. She walked the property line instead, the whole perimeter, slowly, dragging two fingers along the top of the hedge as she went.
"Freya," Hope said.
"She's touching the bushes."
"She's reading the ground."
"Okay, cool, yeah, that's — normal Sunday."
The second car opened and a woman got out and shaded her eyes, and then she saw Hope on the porch and she did not walk over, she arrived, and Stiles genuinely did not catch the middle part of it.
"You're too thin," she said, with her hands on Hope's face.
"Hi, Mom."
"You drove across the country and didn't tell me."
"I told Freya."
"You told Freya *afterwards*, which is the same as telling a wall." Hayley Marshall pulled her in and held the back of her head for a second, hard, and then let her go and turned.
And looked at Stiles.
It was not like Klaus looking at him. Klaus had looked at him the way you look at a document. This was somebody looking at a person.
"So," she said.
"Hi."
"You're him."
"I'm him."
"You look exhausted."
"That's — yeah, that's accurate."
"Good," Hayley said. "You should. Where is she?"
"Asleep. Upstairs. Twenty minutes ago, so — "
"So I've got ten." She went past him into the house and then stopped in the doorway and looked back. "We're going to talk later, you and me."
"Everyone keeps saying that to me."
"Yeah, well." She was already going. "Mine's the one that'll be useful."
Rebekah arrived like weather.
She came up the walk with a garment bag over one arm and three shopping bags in the other hand and a pair of sunglasses she did not remove, and she stopped in front of Stiles and looked him up and down for about four seconds.
"Hm," she said.
"That's the second Mikaelson hm I've gotten this week."
"It's a family instrument." She handed him the shopping bags without asking. "You're taller than he described."
"How did he describe me?"
"He didn't. That's why it's a surprise." She went past him. "Is she awake?"
"No — "
"She will be."
"Rebekah," Hope said.
"I'm going to look at her, Hope, I'm not going to *wake* her, I've done this before."
She woke her.
Stiles found out four minutes later when the sound came down the stairs, and then found out again when Rebekah came down carrying Mira with the total serenity of a woman who had not done anything wrong in her life.
"She was already stirring," she said.
"She was asleep," said Hope.
"She was performing sleep. There's a difference. You did it constantly."
Kol came in through the back door, which nobody had opened.
"There's a shed," he said.
Stiles turned around. "What?"
"In the yard. There's a shed with a padlock on it and I'd like to know what's in it."
"Lawn stuff."
"That's what people say."
"It's what people say because it's lawn stuff."
"Hm," said Kol, and Stiles put both hands over his face.
By four o'clock there were six Mikaelsons in a two-bedroom house on a street where the loudest thing that ever happened was a leaf blower.
Stiles stood in his own kitchen with his back against the counter and watched it.
Rebekah had Mira. Hayley was arguing with Rebekah about how she was holding Mira. Kol had found the cheese. Elijah had arrived last, in a suit, and had shaken Stiles's hand and said *thank you for having us*, which was so profoundly unnecessary that Stiles had not recovered from it. Freya was still outside.
And Klaus was leaning in the doorway to the living room with his arms folded, not participating in any of it, watching his family fill up a room.
He caught Stiles looking.
He didn't say anything. He just tipped his head very slightly, the way you acknowledge somebody across a bar.
Then Freya came in the front door.
And the room changed.
She did not say anything dramatic. She just came in and shut the door and stood there with her coat still on, and one by one the conversations stopped, because everyone in that family had spent a very long time learning to read her face.
"Freya," Klaus said.
"Who's been in the yard?"
Stiles straightened up. "What?"
"Not this yard. The property behind it, and the treeline past that." She pulled her gloves off. "There's old work in the ground here. Very old. Somebody laid something down out there a long time ago and it's still running."
"That's the preserve," Stiles said.
"It's a nemeton," said Klaus.
Everybody looked at him.
"I've been here five days," he said. "I did read a little."
"It's not the tree," Freya said. "The tree's a symptom, and it's about two miles from here, and it's been cut and it's woken up and that's a conversation for another night." She hung her coat over the back of a chair. "I'm talking about the street."
"What about the street?"
"Somebody's been here."
Hope stood up.
"Recently?"
"Within the month." Freya rubbed her thumb and forefinger together like there was grit on them. "Not a witch I know. Not a signature I've seen. Whoever it was walked this block twice, stopped at four houses, and stood on the corner for a long time."
"Doing what?"
"Counting," said Freya.
Nobody said anything.
"Counting what?" Stiles asked.
Freya looked at him for the first time.
"That's a good question," she said, "and I'd like to answer it with my hands on you, if you'll let me."
"Freya," said Hope.
"He's the only variable on this street I can't read from the sidewalk."
"He's not a variable, he's — "
"Hope." Stiles put his hand up. "It's fine."
"It is not fine — "
"It's fine." He looked at Freya. "What do you need?"
"Sit down. Give me your hands. Don't fight it, and if it hurts, say so, because it shouldn't."
He sat down at the kitchen table.
Freya sat across from him and took both his hands, palms up, and laid her own over them, and the room got very quiet. Klaus did not move from the doorway. Hope stood behind Stiles's chair with her hands on the back of it.
Freya closed her eyes.
For a few seconds nothing happened.
Then the light over the stove dimmed, came back, dimmed again, and steadied.
"Freya," Elijah said quietly.
"I know."
"Your nose."
She let go of one of Stiles's hands and wiped it with the back of her wrist without opening her eyes, and there was blood on her sleeve.
"Okay, we're done," Hope said.
"We are not done."
"Freya — "
"*Quiet.*"
The pilot light on the stove went out.
Freya opened her eyes.
She sat back in the chair and pulled her hands away and pressed the heel of one into her eye socket and breathed out, slow, twice.
"Well," she said.
"Well what?" said Klaus.
Freya looked at the table.
"There's a rule," she said. "It's the first thing you learn and it's so basic that nobody bothers to say it out loud after the first year. Everything that exists is *paid for.* Everything. A tree is paid for by the ground. A vampire is paid for by the person they killed to become one. A spell is paid for by whoever cast it, in their strength or their years or their blood, and if you don't pay it, it takes it."
"Freya."
"There's no ledger on him," she said.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning he is here, and alive, and nothing is being spent to keep him that way." She looked up at her brother. "Nik, I've read the Hollow. I read *you* the year you were made. There was a cost written on you so loud I could barely stand in the room. He's got nothing. It's not hidden, it's not shielded, there's no ward on him — I'd feel a ward, a ward is the easiest thing in the world to feel. There's simply no bill."
"What happens to a thing with no bill?" Elijah asked.
"I don't know," Freya said. "It's not a category."
Stiles sat there with his hands still on the table.
"Is that bad?" he said.
"I genuinely don't know."
"You're bleeding."
"Yes."
"That seems bad."
"It's not because you hurt me." Freya folded her hands. "I've had spells pushed back at me. This isn't that. This is what happens when you ask a question that doesn't have an answer, and the asking has a price, and there's nobody on the other end to split it with."
She looked at him, and her expression was not unkind.
"I've never met anything the world doesn't charge for," she said. "It frightened me. I'd rather say that in front of everyone than have you find out I said it to my brother in the driveway."
"Okay," Stiles said.
"Okay?"
"Yeah, I — " he cleared his throat. "That's about the fourth version of this I've heard this week and honestly yours is the politest."
Rebekah, from across the room, with the baby: "Is somebody going to explain what's actually being said here?"
"No," said Hope.
"Hope — "
"Not today."
There was a silence.
And then Klaus pushed off the doorframe.
"Right," he said. "That's enough of that."
"Nik — "
"No. Look at him, Freya, he's been sitting at his own kitchen table being read like a tax return by a woman he met two hours ago, and he's said *okay* four times, and that's four times more grace than anyone in this family would manage." He crossed the kitchen. "We're finished."
Freya sat back.
"For today," she said.
"For today." Klaus stopped beside the table and looked down at Stiles. "You'll want to know whether this changes anything."
"A little, yeah."
"It doesn't." He said it flatly. "You'll notice I didn't ask her to do it. She did it because she's the eldest and she's incapable of leaving a locked door alone, and she'll do it again eventually and I won't stop her then either. But nothing said at this table changes who sleeps in that crib or whose house she sleeps in."
"That's — " Stiles stopped. "Okay."
"Five," said Klaus.
"What?"
"That's five *okays.* Find another word." He went to the window. "Josette's ready. Everyone outside."
They did the wards at dusk.
Stiles stood on the back step with a coat over his shoulders and watched a woman he had been introduced to for eleven seconds walk the line of the fence with a jar in one hand, laying down a thin grey line of something that was not salt.
Freya walked the opposite direction. They met at the back corner and knelt down together and stayed there for about a minute.
Hope came and stood beside him.
"It's mountain ash and three other things," she said. "It'll hold against anything that has to be invited, anything with a claim on it, and most things that were made rather than born."
"And the ones that were born?"
"Then we're standing outside."
The line closed with a sound like a door shutting in another room.
Every dog on the street started barking at once.
"Yeah," said Stiles. "Rosa Delgado's definitely coming over tomorrow."
Hope laughed.
And then, across the street, the lights came on in the Hendersons' house — all of them, every window on all three floors, at the same moment — and a man Stiles did not know walked out onto that porch with a glass in his hand and stood looking at the treeline the way somebody looks at an approaching car.
"Who's that?" Stiles said.
Hope followed his eyes.
She was quiet for a second.
"That's not one of ours," she said.