**STILES**
The Hotel Monteleone had a rotating carousel bar, eleven floors of old-money wallpaper, and a presidential suite that, as of about two-thirty that morning, belonged to Stiles.
The previous occupant had been a pharmaceutical executive from Connecticut named Greg. Greg had opened the door in a monogrammed bathrobe, taken one look at the blood, and said, "Oh, *hell* no." Stiles had found that relatable. He'd compelled Greg to check out, fly home, and leave his credit card behind. Then he'd changed his mind halfway down the hall, because Greg had tried to tip him five dollars to go away.
Greg was in the bathtub now. Stiles was using the other bathroom.
He stood under the shower until the water ran clear instead of pink, then kept standing there, because the water pressure in this place was *spiritual*. He hadn't had a real shower in three states. Motel showers were basically a sad man spitting on you.
"Greg," he called toward the other bathroom, "you had terrible taste in people and amazing taste in hotels. That's your legacy, buddy."
Greg didn't answer. Greg was a good listener now.
Room service came at ten: eggs Benedict, a stack of bacon, two pots of coffee, and a Bloody Mary he'd ordered because he thought it was funny. The kid who wheeled the cart in was maybe nineteen, with a nervous pulse and a name tag that said TREVOR. He tried very hard not to look at the bloody hoodie balled up on the floor by the door.
"Trevor," Stiles said, "do you know where a guy can buy clothes that aren't souvenir T-shirts?"
"Uh... Canal Place? There's a mall."
"A *mall*. God. Okay." He compelled the kid to forget the hoodie and gave him a hundred of Greg's dollars. That wasn't generosity. He genuinely couldn't be bothered to eat him before coffee.
He ate on the balcony in Greg's other bathrobe, watching the French Quarter wake up underneath him. It was delivery trucks and hosed-down sidewalks, a guy walking a basset hound in a tiny raincoat, a mule-drawn carriage with a tour guide already yelling about ghosts.
"Ghosts," Stiles snorted. "Amateur hour."
He felt good. He felt *great*, actually. Klaus's strength was still sitting in his chest like a banked coal. Freya's magic had mostly settled into the rest of the soup, but every once in a while it fizzed up his arms like pop rocks.
And somewhere out there, across maybe a mile of rooftops, was a heartbeat he could pick out as easily as his own name. Slower now. Asleep, maybe.
He sipped the Bloody Mary. It was terrible. He finished it anyway.
---
The mall turned out to be fine. He bought jeans, a leather jacket, six T-shirts, and a red hoodie identical to the old one, because he was a man who knew his brand. He compelled the cashier into a ninety-percent discount. It wasn't that he needed the money. Watching her say "that'll be eleven dollars" with total sincerity was just the best part of his day so far.
He walked back into the Quarter around one in the afternoon with his shopping bags, which was how he knew something was up.
Nobody was following him. That was the problem. At lunchtime on a Tuesday, or possibly a Thursday, the Quarter should have been busy, and it was, except in a very specific way. The street around him kept emptying. There was a gap in the crowd, moving with him like the parting of a sea.
Someone had put the word out.
Stiles stopped in front of a praline shop, admired his own reflection in the glass, and said, loudly, "Guys. Come on. I can *hear* you. One of you has a clicky knee."
Silence.
"It's like being hunted by a bag of Rice Krispies."
They came out of an alley across the street: six of them, all vampires, with daylight rings glinting and the same don't-mess-with-us walk as last night's pool-table guy. The one in front was big and bald, with forearms like hams and a tattoo of a fleur-de-lis on his neck.
"Klaus wants a word," Ham Arms said.
"Klaus had a word. Several, actually. Most of them were 'get out.'" Stiles shifted his bags to one hand. "And I did. Very graciously. I didn't even take a souvenir."
"You killed Ray and Jimmy."
"Were those the pool guys? I didn't get names. I was busy." He tilted his head. "Honestly, one of them tasted like an old gym bag. Was that Ray? Tell me that was Ray."
Ham Arms stepped closer. The other five spread out in a half-circle, cutting off the street. A tourist couple with a street map took one look, turned right around, and walked briskly the other way. Good instincts.
"You're coming with us," Ham Arms said. "Or we drag you."
Stiles sighed and set his bags down very carefully against the praline-shop window.
"Okay. Rules. Nobody touches the bags. I just bought this jacket. It's Italian. Or the tag says it is. I think it might be lying, but I'm choosing to believe."
Ham Arms lunged.
He was fast. For a vampire who'd probably been turned in the eighties, he was *very* fast. Stiles caught his wrist anyway, turned it the wrong way until it snapped, then put his other palm flat against the guy's face and *pulled*.
It came fast and ugly: that cold, bitter vampire taste, like drinking out of a gutter. Ham Arms's scream went high and thin as his skin grayed and caved in over his cheekbones.
The other five came all at once.
Stiles had been in a lot of fights over the last few years. The early ones had been miserable. He'd been the human who got thrown into lockers and slammed into windshields and kidnapped by basically every villain with a van. These days fights were more like a game of Whac-A-Mole where he was also the hammer.
One vampire came in low. Stiles kicked him through the praline-shop window, and the glass exploded outward in a sparkling wave. Another grabbed him from behind. Stiles leaned back into the guy, took hold of both his arms, and siphoned until the grip went slack and the vampire folded up like a lawn chair. The third got close enough to get his fangs in Stiles's shoulder. Stiles let him, just for a second, just to see.
The guy pulled back, coughing, eyes watering, mouth smoking.
"Yeah," Stiles said sympathetically. "I'm not a great vintage."
He tore that one's head off. It wasn't a clean process. It took a couple of tries, like opening a jar.
The last two ran.
"Oh, come *on*!" Stiles yelled after them. "You had the numbers! You had a *plan*!"
He caught one before the corner and broke his spine over a fire hydrant. The other made it all the way to Chartres Street before Stiles landed on him from a second-story balcony. The whole thing took maybe forty seconds.
When it was done, Stiles was standing in the middle of the street surrounded by bodies, broken glass, and an entire tray of pralines scattered across the sidewalk. The shop owner was a tiny old woman in an apron, standing frozen in her ruined doorway.
Stiles looked at the pralines.
"Are those pecan?"
She nodded mutely.
He picked one up off the top of the pile, blew off the glass, and ate it.
"Oh, wow. Oh, that's *really* good." He pointed at her. "You're not getting eaten today, ma'am. Pure talent. Five stars."
He looked around at the bodies. Then he looked at the head, which had rolled up against a lamppost.
An idea arrived. It was a bad idea, and a *great* one.
"Ma'am," Stiles said, "do you have a box? Like a nice box? With a ribbon?"
---
**HOPE**
The box arrived at a quarter to four.
Hope was in the kitchen with Aunt Freya, who had been awake for about thirty hours. Freya had been going through grimoires at the island like she was studying for the world's worst final. She'd been cross-referencing siphoners and hybrids and anything that mentioned something unkillable, while Hope handed her coffee and tried to read over her shoulder without looking like she was reading over her shoulder.
"There's nothing," Freya said for the fifth time. She shoved a book away. "Siphoners pull magic. Fine. There are ways around that: spells anchored outside their reach, magic they can't touch. But a siphoner who can pull from *vampires*? From your *father*? There's nothing on this, Hope. Nothing. It shouldn't be possible."
"He said he was a Swiss Army knife," Hope said. "Where every tool is murder."
Freya gave her a look. "I'm aware of what he said."
"I'm just saying he wasn't wrong."
"And *you* are not supposed to find him funny."
"I don't," Hope lied.
Her father came in through the courtyard doors carrying a pink striped pastry box tied up with a curly white ribbon, holding it the way someone holds a bomb.
"A delivery boy brought this," he said. His voice was very, very calm. The calmer her father got, the worse things were. "Addressed to me."
He set it on the island. There was a little card tucked under the ribbon in loopy blue pen:
*KLAUS!!! Loved your guys. They were super enthusiastic. 2/10, would not recommend. Pralines are on me. — S*
*P.S. The lady at the shop says her window was $4,000. That one's on you, I think. Your guys broke it.*
Her father pulled the ribbon. Hope's mom and Uncle Elijah had come in behind him, and nobody breathed as he opened the lid.
Inside, on a bed of crinkly white tissue paper, sat a head. It was bald. There was a fleur-de-lis tattoo on the neck. And very carefully arranged around it, like a garnish, were a dozen pecan pralines.
"Oh my God," Hope said.
Her mom swore creatively. Freya put her face in her hands.
Uncle Elijah looked at the box for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, "That was Marcus. He's been in this city since 1987."
"Six men," her father said. He hadn't looked away from the head. "I sent six. In *daylight*, in the middle of the Quarter. And he sent me back one." His jaw worked. "With *candy*."
"Niklaus," Elijah said. "We need to reconsider..."
"We need to *kill* him, Elijah."
"He can't be killed," Freya said into her hands. "That's the problem. That's the whole problem. I've been through every book in this house. I can't bind what I can't cast at, and I can't cast at something that *eats spells*."
"Then we find something that isn't a spell."
"Like what? You tried to strangle him. He drank you."
The whole kitchen went silent. Her father slowly turned his head to look at Freya, and Freya lifted her chin and looked right back.
"It's true," she said. "I'm sorry, but it is."
Hope stared into the pink box and did not laugh. It was the hardest thing she'd ever done. It wasn't *funny*. A man was dead. Six men were dead. But the card said *2/10*, and there were pralines around the head like a *garnish*, and she could practically hear his voice.
Her father's eyes cut to her. Of course he'd noticed.
"Something amusing, Hope?"
"No."
"Your mouth is twitching."
"It's not."
"Hope Andrea Mikaelson."
"It's the *pralines*, Dad." She pressed her lips together hard. "I'm sorry. It's just... He made a *card*."
"He made a card," her father repeated flatly.
"I'm not saying it's *okay*."
"I should hope not."
"I'm just saying he's not doing this because he's scared of you or trying to start a war or whatever." Hope pushed off the counter. "He's doing it because it's fun. He's *bored*. He said it last night. He's literally just doing stuff to see what you'll do."
"And your point?"
"My point is that you sending more people is exactly what he wants. You're giving him something to play with."
Her father's eyes went very flat.
"You're going to stay in this house," he said. "Until this is dealt with."
"Dad..."
"He looked at you like a meal, Hope. He *told* you he wanted you. He told you to your face, in my home. You are not going *anywhere*."
"I'm eighteen."
"And he's a monster who eats witches." He said it quietly. Somehow that was worse than shouting. "I don't care if you're eighteen or eight hundred. You're staying in this house."
Her mom touched Hope's shoulder. It was gentle, but it was the kind of touch that meant *don't push him right now*.
Hope didn't push him.
She went upstairs to her room, closed the door, and sat on her bed. She pressed her hand over the spot under her ribs, where the hook had been sitting all day, pulling and pulling like a leash.
It was pointing northeast now, toward the river.
At sunset, when her mom went to check on Freya, Hope drew a cloaking sigil on the inside of her wrist in eyeliner. She whispered the spell she'd learned at school, the one she'd used to sneak into town for pizza and sneak back before anyone noticed. Then she went out her window.
---
**STILES**
Frenchmen Street at night was a whole different animal from Bourbon. It was less screaming, more music. Every bar had a band, and every band was better than it had any right to be. A brass group was playing on the corner under a streetlight, surrounded by people dancing badly and happily.
Stiles was sitting on the curb across the street eating beignets out of a paper bag. He was covered in so much powdered sugar he looked like he'd lost a fight with a cocaine dealer.
He felt her before he saw her.
The hook went taut in his chest the way it had last night, except closer now. *Much* closer. It was bright, tangled magic, moving toward him from the east. It was cloaked, too. He could feel the edges of the spell like a blanket draped over a lamp. It would've fooled a vampire. It would've fooled a wolf.
It didn't fool him. He was hungry, and hunger was very good at finding things.
He took another bite of beignet and waited.
She came around the corner a few minutes later in a black jacket, with her hair down this time, and walked straight toward him through the crowd like she'd known exactly where he'd be. She probably had. She stopped a few feet away. The cloak flickered and faded off her like steam.
"You're covered in sugar," Hope said.
"You're covered in bad decisions," Stiles said. "Pretty sure your dad said 'stay home' in, like, a real scary voice."
"How do you know that?"
"Because he's a dad. And I sent him a head." He held out the bag. "Beignet?"
She stared at him for a long moment. Then, to his genuine surprise, she sat down on the curb next to him, not close, maybe three feet away, and took one.
"He got the box," she said.
"Oh yeah? Did he like the card?"
"He hated the card."
"He's not a card guy. I could tell. He's more of a *brooding in a doorway* guy." Stiles licked sugar off his thumb. "Did the pralines survive? I was worried about the pralines. They were really good. That lady's a genius."
"The pralines were *around a head*."
"They were *presented*, Hope. There's a difference."
Her mouth twitched. She fought it. He watched her fight it and lose. It came out as a short, horrified laugh that she smothered in her own sleeve.
"Oh my God," she said, muffled. "Oh my God. I'm the worst."
"Nah," Stiles said. "You're just fun. Different thing. Your family's not fun. I mean, they're scary fun. Horror movie fun. But you actually laughed, so."
She pulled her sleeve away and glared at him. "Six people are dead."
"Five and a half. I left most of one on Chartres Street."
"*Stiles*."
"What?" He shrugged. "They came at me. In broad daylight. In front of a candy shop. What was I supposed to do? Take them to a nice dinner? Talk about our feelings? They'd have killed me if they could. They couldn't. That's just math."
"And the bartender? Dwayne?"
He actually had to think for a second. "Oh. Dwayne. Yeah, no, I just ate Dwayne. He lied to me."
Hope looked at him. It was the same look she'd given him last night on the stairs, like she was reading something printed very small.
"You really don't care," she said. "At all."
"About Dwayne? Honestly? No." He took another beignet. "I'm not gonna pretend I do. That'd be weird. He was a guy. He poured drinks. He's not pouring drinks anymore. The end."
"And your dad?"
The beignet stopped halfway to his mouth.
Hope saw it. He watched her see it.
He put the beignet back in the bag.
"Okay, so, here's a fun party tip," Stiles said, still very pleasant. "When somebody's being nice to you and sharing their beignets? You don't bring up their dad. That's rule number one. It's right there in the handbook."
"You brought him up first. Last night."
"Last night was a speech. Speeches have a *structure*. This is a *curb*."
"You got angry. When you talked about him. You got angry about your friends, too. But not the bartender. Not the people you killed." She was watching him closely. She was leaning in a little, like she really wanted to know. "Why?"
"Because the bartender never looked at me across a *kitchen table*..." Stiles heard his voice go up. He heard it come out sharp and hot. A lamp on the bar patio behind them buzzed and went dark. "...like I was something that *crawled out of the drain*, Hope. Dwayne didn't know me. Dwayne didn't *owe* me. My dad raised me. Scott got bitten, and I *stayed*. I stayed when I could've run. I kept that whole stupid town alive with a bat and a *library card*. I got possessed. I got kidnapped. I got beat up by *everything*. And the one time something good happens to me, the one time I'm not the weak one anymore, they look at me like *I'm* the problem."
He stopped. His eyes had gone gold at the edges. He blinked it back.
The brass band played on. Nobody on the corner had noticed.
"So yeah," he said, in a normal voice again. "I'm pissed. I'm allowed to be pissed. That's not the same as *caring*. I don't want them back. I don't want to go home. I don't want to talk it out on a couch. I just think they're idiots, and I hope something eats Scott's motorcycle." He picked the beignet back up and bit into it. "Anyway. Your turn. Tell me something about *your* dad. Wait. No. I met him. Pass."
Hope was quiet for a moment.
"He's going to find me," she said. "He's probably already looking."
"Oh, definitely. He's got the look of a guy who puts trackers on stuff." Stiles glanced at her. "So why are you here, Hope? Seriously. Your dad told you to stay home. Your mom told you I looked at you like food. Which, fair. I did. I do. I'm still doing it a little right now. So why'd you climb out a window to come sit on a curb with the guy who put a head in a box?"
She looked down at her hands.
"I felt you," she said. "Last night. Before you knocked. Something pulled at my magic. Right here." She touched the spot under her ribs. "It's been pulling all day, and it hasn't stopped. It pointed right at you. It's still pointing at you, and I wanted to know why."
Stiles stopped chewing.
Huh.
He'd assumed that was just him. His hunger, doing its hunger thing. He hadn't considered it might go *both ways*.
"Okay," he said slowly. "That's interesting."
"Is it you? Are you doing it?"
"Not on purpose. Trust me, if I was doing stuff on purpose, you'd know." He studied her, head tilted. "Can I try something?"
"No."
"Can I try something *small*?"
Hope's heartbeat kicked up. He heard it. She knew he heard it.
"Like what?" she said.
He held out his hand, palm up, between them on the curb. It was powdered sugar and all.
"Put your hand on mine," he said. "I'll take a little. Tiny. A sip. Just to see what happens."
"You said you'd take it all."
"I said I'd take it *eventually*." He smiled. "This isn't eventually. This is a snack. I'll stop."
"How do I know that?"
"You don't," Stiles said honestly. "But I told your dad to his face I was gonna do it, and I told *you* to your face I was gonna do it. I've been really upfront about all the murder so far. Why would I start lying now?"
Hope looked at his hand for a long, long moment.
Then she put hers in it.
---
**HOPE**
It didn't hurt.
That was the first thing she noticed, and it scared her more than anything. She'd braced for it to hurt. She'd seen her father's veins go gray and Freya's knees buckle on the stairs.
Instead, it felt like the hook in her chest had been waiting for exactly this. The moment their palms touched, it *went*, a long slow pull up out of her ribs, down her arm, and into his hand. Her magic followed it like water running downhill. It was witch, wolf, and all the tangled old pieces of her that even she didn't understand, pouring out through her fingers into him.
And something came *back*.
It was just a thread, thin and hot. For one second she felt him on the other side of it. She felt his hunger, which was enormous, bottomless, *starving*, like staring into a well with no floor. She felt Klaus's strength sitting heavy in the middle of it, and Freya's magic fizzing, and something else under all of it. It was wild and electric and completely unbothered, the way a storm is unbothered.
There was no guilt in it anywhere. Not one scrap. She went looking without meaning to, reaching down the thread into him, and there was nothing to find. There was the hunger, and the anger she'd seen on the curb, and underneath it all, a vast, bright, cheerful *nothing*, like an empty stadium with the lights left on.
Stiles made a sound.
It was low and rough, and it came from somewhere deep in his chest. His eyes had gone red, all the way red, glowing in the streetlight, and his fingers had closed around hers. He wasn't hurting her, but he was holding on.
"*Oh*," he breathed. "Oh, you're *good*."
The pull got stronger. Hope's head swam. Her knees would have buckled if she'd been standing.
"Stiles..."
He let go.
Just like that. He opened his hand and sat back on the curb, head tipped against a lamppost, eyes shut. His chest was rising and falling fast. The red lines under his skin were crawling up his wrist and fading slowly.
"Okay," he said, his voice wrecked. "Okay. Wow. That's... Yeah. I'm gonna need a second."
Hope stared at her own hand. It was tingling, pins and needles all the way to her elbow. Her magic felt thinner, lighter, like she'd given blood. The hook in her chest was still there, but it didn't *pull* anymore. It just sat there, humming, satisfied.
"You stopped," she said.
He opened one red eye. "I said I would."
"Why?"
"Because if I didn't, I wouldn't get to do it again." He closed the eye. "Pretty simple, Hope. You don't finish the whole pint of Ben & Jerry's on the first night. You'd have nothing to look forward to."
She didn't know if that was the worst thing anyone had ever said to her or the most honest. Maybe both.
"I felt you," she said quietly. "When you were doing it. I could feel inside you."
Both his eyes opened.
"Yeah?" His voice sharpened, curious. "What'd you find?"
"Nothing." She swallowed. "I looked for... I don't know. Guilt. Something. There isn't anything. You're angry. And you're hungry. And that's it."
Stiles smiled slowly. It was a wide, delighted smile, with sugar still caught at one corner.
"*Told* you," he said. "I've been telling everybody. Nobody believes me. It's very frustrating."
"That's horrible."
"That's *efficient*."
The hair on the back of Hope's neck stood up.
She knew that feeling. She'd known it her whole life, like a change in weather.
Stiles's head turned toward the end of the street a half-second before hers did.
"Aaand there's Dad," he said.
Her father walked out of the crowd like the crowd had never been there. It parted around him without knowing why. His eyes were gold, and his face was a mask so calm it looked carved out of marble.
"Hope," he said. "Come here."
She stood up. Her legs felt shaky. Her father's gaze dropped to her hand, still tingling, then up to her face. She watched him *see* it: the missing magic, the pallor, the hook she didn't know how to hide.
Something moved behind his eyes that made the whole street feel colder.
"You fed on my daughter."
"Siphoned," Stiles corrected. He stayed sitting on the curb with his bag of beignets. "Tiny bit. Fully consensual. Ask her."
"*Dad*..."
"Hope." Her father didn't look at her. "*Go*."
Stiles rolled his eyes so hard it looked like it hurt.
"Klaus, buddy. I'm on a curb. I'm eating beignets. Nobody's being eaten. If I wanted to eat her, I would've done it last night in your foyer, and you'd have had to watch." He took a bite. "I'm being *extremely* chill right now. This is the chillest I've been in weeks."
Her father moved.
Hope didn't even see it. One second he was twenty feet away and the next he was *there*, driving Stiles off the curb and into the lamppost. The pole bent in half with a scream of metal. The bag of beignets exploded in a cloud of powdered sugar.
The brass band stopped playing. Someone screamed, and the crowd scattered.
Stiles hit the sidewalk on his back. He lay there for a second, blinking up at the drifting sugar.
"Oh my God," he said. "The *beignets*."
"Get up," her father snarled.
Stiles got up.
He did it slowly, brushing sugar off his leather jacket. When he looked at her father his eyes had gone red again, still bright with Hope's magic. For the first time since he'd walked into their courtyard, he looked genuinely annoyed.
"Those were *six dollars*, man."
"Dad, stop!"
"Stay back, Hope."
"I'm serious!" Her voice cracked across the street. "You can't touch him! Every time you touch him, he gets *stronger*. That's the whole point! You're *feeding* him!"
Her father went still. Stiles went still too. They both looked at her.
Then Stiles grinned.
"She's right," he said. "She's super right. She's the smartest person in your family, and it's not close." He held up both hands. "Look, I'm gonna go. Not because I'm scared of you. I'm not. At all. I just don't want to do the whole fight thing in front of the band. They were good. They didn't deserve that."
He stepped backward into the dark between two buildings, still grinning.
"Night, Klaus. Night, Hope." His red eyes found hers in the shadows. "Thanks for dinner."
Then he was gone.
---
**HOPE**
Her father didn't say a word the whole walk home.
He didn't have to. Hope could feel it coming off him in waves, a silence so loud it made her ears ring. He walked half a step ahead, close enough to grab her if anything moved. Every shadow they passed, his head turned.
They were three blocks from the compound when he finally stopped under a gas lamp and turned to look at her.
"Why?" he said. That was all.
Hope opened her mouth. She didn't have an answer that made sense, so she told him the truth.
"Because it pulls at me. Here." She pressed a hand under her ribs. "Since last night. It doesn't stop. I wanted to know why."
"And now you know?"
"No." She hesitated. "It stopped hurting when he took some. It's quiet now."
Her father looked at her for a very long moment. His face did something she'd only seen once or twice in her whole life, the night her mother almost died and the day she'd left for school. It was fear. Real fear.
"Hope," he said quietly. "Listen to me. I have been what he is. Not exactly, but close enough. I know what it looks like to be a thing that enjoys it. And I know what it looks like when that thing finds something it *wants*." He touched her face. "He will not stop. He'll come back and take a little more, and a little more, until there's nothing left of you."
"You don't know that."
"I know *him*," her father said. "Because I *was* him."
He turned and walked on.
Hope followed. The hook under her ribs hummed, quiet and satisfied. It was still pointing back toward Frenchmen Street.
---
**STILES**
He sat on the roof of the Monteleone at three in the morning, next to a rooftop pool nobody was allowed to use after ten, with his feet in the water.
He'd eaten a guy on the walk back. He was a random guy, a drunk tourist from Ohio who'd tried to pick a fight with him on Decatur about the powdered sugar. Stiles had drained him in an alley and left him behind a dumpster, and he'd forgotten the guy's face before he made it back to the hotel.
It didn't help.
That was new. Usually eating helped for at least an hour. Tonight it had tasted like nothing. It was like eating rice cakes after a steak.
He could still taste her.
Witch and wolf and that old, deep, tangled *something*, bright as lightning. It was sitting in his chest right on top of Klaus and Freya like it owned the place. When he closed his eyes he could feel the thread, still there, thin and warm, running across the whole Quarter to a bedroom somewhere behind a stone wall.
She'd gone looking inside him. He'd felt her doing it, poking around like she'd walked into a stranger's house and started opening cabinets.
And she'd found nothing. She'd told him so to his face, sounding horrified. He was pretty sure she'd been a tiny bit impressed, too.
Stiles kicked at the water.
"Okay," he told the empty pool. "*Now* it's interesting."
Somewhere across the rooftops, faint and steady, her heart was beating.
Her father was going to lock her in a tower. He was going to put witches on every door and wolves in every hallway. He was going to do the whole Rapunzel thing.
Stiles grinned at the dark.
He was *really* looking forward to it.