**STILES**
By the second night, nothing tasted right.
He tried. He really tried. He ate a bouncer on Bourbon Street who'd shoved a girl into a wall. He didn't do it for the girl; he did it because the bouncer had been loud about it and Stiles had a headache. He ate a vampire who ran a blood den out of a jazz club on Rampart. He ate two of the vampire's regulars, just to be thorough. Around midnight he ate a witch who tried to hex him outside a voodoo shop. He siphoned her dry in about four seconds, and it was like chewing a mouthful of pennies.
Nothing. It filled him up the way air fills a balloon, big and hollow and gone the second he stopped.
Meanwhile, every time he closed his eyes, there she was. Witch and wolf and that old, tangled lightning. It was still sitting in his chest from last night, fading slowly like the taste of good whiskey, and everything else tasted like tap water next to it.
"This is a problem," he told the bartender at the Carousel Bar. The bar actually rotated. It went around the room so slowly you didn't notice until you'd been there an hour and realized you were facing a totally different wall. Stiles loved it. It was the most New Orleans thing he'd ever seen: a bar that was also a very slow ride.
The bartender, a woman with gray braids and a vest, polished a glass and didn't look up. "What kind of problem, baby?"
"I had something really good, and now everything else is garbage."
"Oh, honey." She set a whiskey in front of him. "That's a man problem. Don't matter how old you get, that one never goes away."
"It's not a man. It's a..." Stiles thought about it. "Witch-wolf. Miracle baby. Kind of a smart-ass."
"Mm-hm. Those are the worst ones."
"*Right*?"
Someone sat down on the stool next to him.
Stiles smelled him before he looked. It was expensive cologne, old paper, and very faint, very carefully controlled blood. There was power under all of it, heavy and old like his brother's, but with the edges sanded down and polished.
"Elijah," Stiles said without turning. "You're gonna want to order something. It's a rotating bar. There's etiquette."
"Bourbon," Elijah said to the bartender. "Neat. Thank you."
She poured it and moved away down the bar with the instincts of a woman who'd worked in the Quarter for thirty years.
Stiles finally turned on his stool and looked at him. The suit was charcoal tonight, perfectly pressed, with a pocket square. He looked like he'd come to foreclose on someone's house.
"So they sent the diplomat," Stiles said. "Love that. Klaus sends six guys with muscles, it doesn't work, and he goes, *Elijah, go be classy at him*."
"My brother didn't send me."
"Oh, so this is a *side quest*."
"This is a conversation." Elijah turned his glass a quarter-inch on the bar. "One I'd like to have before anyone else in this city dies."
"Okay, well, you're like four hours too late for that. Sorry. Do you know a guy who ran a blood den on Rampart? Kind of a goatee? Thought he was really cool?"
A muscle moved in Elijah's jaw. "Terrence."
"Sure. That tracks. Terrence is not running a blood den anymore." Stiles sipped his whiskey. "His regulars aren't regulars anymore either. And there's a witch outside that voodoo shop on Dumaine who's gonna need a closed casket. She tried to give me the *pinch*. Like a spell pinch. Right here." He pointed at his neck. "Rude."
Elijah looked at him for a long moment. There was no anger in his face. It was worse than anger. It was *assessment*, the way a man looks at a lock he means to pick.
"What would it take," Elijah said, "for you to leave New Orleans?"
Stiles blinked. Then he laughed, a real, delighted bark that made the couple at the end of the bar jump.
"Oh my God. You're trying to *buy* me. That's amazing. What's the offer? Money? A castle? A nice villa in Tuscany? Do you guys have a villa in Tuscany? You *look* like you have a villa in Tuscany."
"We have several."
"Of *course* you do."
"Name your price, Stiles. Anything within reason."
"Okay, see, that's where you lose me. *Within reason*." Stiles spun his glass on the bar. "I don't want money. I compelled a guy's credit card yesterday. I've got a presidential suite and a guy named Greg in the bathtub. I don't want a villa. I don't want a castle. I want to not be *bored*, man. That's the whole list. And this is the least bored I've been in months. Why would I leave?"
"Because my brother will not stop."
"He can't *start*. That's the funny part."
"Then because of Hope."
The glass stopped spinning.
Stiles looked up at him. Elijah hadn't moved, but there was something in his eyes now, a flicker of real, cold steel under all the polish.
"She came home last night," Elijah said evenly, "pale. Her magic thinned. Her father found her on a curb beside a creature who's been slaughtering his way through this city for two days, and who told her, in our own home, that he intended to consume her."
"*Eventually*," Stiles said. "Details matter, Elijah."
"She's a child."
"She's eighteen. She told me so. Very forcefully. Kind of a sore spot, I think." Stiles leaned back. "And she walked right up to me. I didn't drag her anywhere. She climbed out a window, found me, sat on a curb, and ate my beignets. I *offered*. She *said yes*. You people have a real consent problem with her, you know that? Everybody's always deciding things for her."
"Says the man who wants to drain her."
"Yeah, but I *told* her that. I'm honest about the murder. Nobody in your family's honest about anything."
Elijah took a slow sip of bourbon. When he set the glass down, his voice had softened in a way that made every hair on the back of Stiles's neck stand straight up.
"Your father," Elijah said. "The sheriff."
"Oh, don't."
"You told us he asked what you were. Across a kitchen table." Elijah met his eyes. "I've been a father, Stiles, in every way but the one that counts. I raised my brother's daughter half her life. And I can tell you that when a man looks at his son and sees something he doesn't recognize, sometimes the question isn't *what are you*. Sometimes it's *what happened to you*, and *how do I get you back*..."
The glass in Stiles's hand exploded.
So did every glass on the bar. There was a single sharp *crack*, like a rifle shot. Whiskey and bourbon and melting ice sprayed everywhere. The couple at the end screamed. The overhead lights flared white-hot and blew out one after another around the carousel, *pop-pop-pop-pop*, until the only light left was the neon from the street.
Stiles was on his feet. He didn't remember standing up. His eyes had gone blazing red, and the air around him was so hot the whiskey on the bar started to steam.
"You don't know him," he said. It came out low and vicious. "You don't *know* him. You met me two days ago. You don't get to sit there in your little suit with your little *pocket square* and tell me what my dad meant. He *meant* it. I was *there*. I heard it. He looked at me like a *case file*. Like I was something to *process*. And I've got literally *zero* interest in some thousand-year-old guy who daggers his own siblings for fun explaining *fatherhood* to me at a rotating bar."
Elijah didn't move, not even when a sliver of glass cut a thin line along his cheek and healed.
"I've touched a nerve," he said quietly.
"You touched a *guy who can't die*," Stiles snapped. "Big difference. One of them hurts. The other one's just gonna make my night really fun if you keep going."
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Glass crunched under Stiles's sneakers. The bar kept turning, slow and oblivious, carrying them around past the dark windows.
Then Stiles let out a breath and dropped back onto his stool. He shook whiskey off his hand.
"Anyway," he said, perfectly pleasant again. "That's a no on the villa."
Elijah stood. He straightened his cuffs. He left a hundred-dollar bill on the ruined bar for the bartender, who was crouched behind the register with her hands over her head.
"You should know," Elijah said, "that my sister has rebuilt the wards around our home. She's anchored them in ways even you can't simply swallow. You won't reach Hope again."
"Oh yeah?" Stiles grinned up at him. The red was still bleeding at the edges of his eyes. "Tell Klaus I'm coming over for dinner."
---
**HOPE**
The house felt like a held breath.
Aunt Freya had spent the whole day building wards. Hope had watched from the stairs, handing her candles and chalk and jars of salt, until her fingers were stained with grave dirt and her clothes smelled like sage. These weren't the normal wards. These were layered and anchored into the foundations of the house, into the stone itself, into things Hope didn't fully understand. Every window, every door, every inch of the walls hummed with it. It was so thick Hope could feel it on her skin like static before a storm.
"He can't siphon what he can't reach," Freya had said. She'd looked grim and exhausted, with a smear of chalk on her cheek. "I've tied it to the house itself. To the stone. He'd have to eat the building."
"Could he?" Hope had asked.
Freya hadn't answered.
Now it was almost midnight. Her father was in the courtyard, pacing slow lines along the flagstones like a caged animal. Uncle Elijah had come home an hour ago with glass in his hair and a look on his face that made even her father stop talking. He'd told them about the bar in five flat sentences. He'd finished with *He says he's coming for dinner*, and her father had gone completely silent.
Her mom was sitting on the end of Hope's bed.
"You've been quiet," her mom said.
"I've been locked in my room."
"You're not locked in."
"There are wards on the windows, Mom."
Her mom didn't argue. She looked at Hope for a long moment, the way she'd looked at her every day since Hope was born, like she was checking to make sure all the pieces were still there.
"Tell me what it felt like," her mom said. "Last night. When he..."
"Siphoned."
"When he took from you."
Hope hesitated. She'd told her father some of it, the walking-home version, the version with no details. Her mom was different. Her mom was a wolf, and wolves could smell a lie from across a county.
"It didn't hurt," Hope said quietly. "That's the part I can't stop thinking about. I thought it would hurt. It *should've* hurt. But it felt..." She pressed her hand to the spot under her ribs. "Like something was finally quiet. Like I'd been hungry my whole life and didn't know it."
Her mom went very still.
"And I felt him," Hope went on. "Inside. There's this thread now, between us. I don't know how else to explain it. When he was doing it, I could feel what he was. It's just... hunger, Mom. So much of it. And anger, about his family. But the people he kills?" She swallowed. "There's nothing. Not even a little. It's like looking into an empty room."
Her mom took Hope's hand. Her palm was warm and rough, a wolf's hand.
"Your father used to be like that," she said. "When I met him. Not quite, but close. He'd kill someone and not blink. I used to watch him do it and think, *There's nothing in there*." She squeezed. "And there was. It was buried so deep it took a thousand years and a baby to dig it out. But it was *there*, Hope. It was always there."
"You think Stiles is like that?"
Her mom's face hardened.
"No," she said. "I think Stiles is exactly what he says he is. And I think you want him not to be. That's what scares me."
Hope didn't have an answer for that.
The hook under her ribs gave a sharp, hard tug.
Hope sat straight up. Her mom's head snapped toward the window a half-second later, nostrils flaring, eyes flooding gold.
Outside, far off across the Quarter, something was *laughing*.
---
**STILES**
The wards were *gorgeous*.
He stood across the street from the compound, hands in his jacket pockets, and just *looked* at them for a minute. They were layer on layer on layer, glowing faintly gold to his eyes. They were woven into the stone like veins in marble, down into the foundation, all the way into the ground. It was the most beautiful magic he'd ever seen. It was like someone had taken a cathedral and turned it into a spell.
"Freya, you absolute *nerd*," he said admiringly. "You made a *lasagna*."
He crossed the street.
The wards noticed him about ten feet from the gate. He felt them flare, bright and hot, a wall of force pushing back at him like wind before a hurricane. His sneakers skidded on the sidewalk. It was actually *strong*. Wow. He'd have been impressed if he wasn't about to eat it.
He put his hand flat on the gate.
The first layer came up into his palm like hot syrup, sweet and thick and heavy, and his arm lit up red to the elbow. The second came right behind it, then the third. They didn't want to come. He could feel them clinging to the stone, dug in deep, anchored in the foundation. Freya had done her homework.
So he pulled *harder*.
He pulled with everything: Klaus's strength sitting in his chest, what was left of Freya's magic from the first night, and the last bright, burning thread of Hope. He pulled until his teeth ached and his eyes burned and the red lines crawled up his throat and across his face. The gate got warm under his hand, then hot, then glowing. The iron bars started to *sag*.
Somewhere inside the house, he heard Freya scream.
Then the whole thing came loose all at once, like a tablecloth yanked out from under a set table. It was the most magic he'd ever taken in one go. It hit him like a freight train and he staggered back and dropped to one knee on the sidewalk, laughing and laughing, because it felt like *fireworks*. Like the Fourth of July going off inside his ribs.
"*Oh my God*," he wheezed. "Oh my God, that's so *good*."
The gate had melted. It had literally melted, the bars drooping like candle wax and pooling on the stone. Stiles got up, brushed off his knee, and walked through it.
The courtyard was full of Mikaelsons.
Klaus stood in the middle, gold-eyed and furious. Elijah was at his shoulder, jaw tight, with a little line of healed glass cut still pink on his cheek. Freya was slumped at the bottom of the stairs, gray-faced, with Hayley's arm around her, holding her up.
"Hi, honey, I'm home," Stiles said. "What's for dinner?"
Klaus came at him.
Stiles let him. He didn't even bother moving. Klaus hit him like a truck and slammed him back into the courtyard wall hard enough to crack the stone. Klaus's hand was around his throat again, the same as the first night, and his other hand was punching straight through Stiles's chest.
Stiles looked down at the hybrid's arm, buried in his ribs up to the wrist. Klaus's fingers were wrapped around his heart.
"Oh wow," Stiles said. "Okay. That's new. That's actually *really* uncomfortable."
"Let's see," Klaus hissed, "if you can live without it."
He *pulled*.
Stiles's heart came out of his chest in Klaus's fist with a wet, horrible sound.
The courtyard went silent. Freya made a noise. Hayley's hand went over her mouth.
Stiles looked at his own heart, still beating, in Klaus Mikaelson's hand.
Then he looked at Klaus.
"Dude," he said. "Gross."
The hole in his chest was already closing. Klaus felt it. Stiles watched his face as the ribs knit together around his wrist and the muscle sealed up. Something was already growing back in there, fast, faster than it had any right to. The heart in Klaus's hand shriveled, went gray, and crumbled into ash between his fingers.
Stiles put his hand over Klaus's hand, the one still around his throat, and *pulled*.
Klaus's knees went. Stiles hadn't known they could. Klaus went down to one knee on the flagstones, gasping. His arm was gray to the shoulder and his face was going ashen. He tried to wrench away. He couldn't wrench away.
"See, this is what I've been *saying*," Stiles told him conversationally. "Every time. *Every time*, man. You grab me, I eat you. We've been over this. It's like watching a dog run into a sliding glass door."
"*Niklaus*!" Elijah lunged.
Stiles let go of Klaus and caught Elijah by the collar in the same motion. He spun him around and put him through the fountain. Stone and water exploded everywhere.
Then he looked up at the second floor.
At a window.
At a girl standing in it, with both hands pressed flat against the glass. Her face was pale and her auburn hair was loose, and her eyes were locked right on him.
The hook in his chest *sang*.
"Be right back," Stiles told the courtyard. He went straight up the wall.
---
**HOPE**
He came through her window like it wasn't there.
The wards on it were gone. Hope had felt them go when the gate melted. Every layer Freya had spent the whole day weaving had gone out like a candle. He opened the window the normal way, with the latch, and climbed in over the sill. There was water in his hair, blood soaking the front of his shirt, and a huge, ragged hole torn through the fabric right over his heart. The skin under it was already smooth and whole.
Her mom was between them before his feet touched the floor. She was fully shifted, the enormous black wolf filling half the room, lips peeled back over teeth as long as Hope's fingers.
Stiles looked at the wolf.
"Oh, hey, Hayley," he said. "Love the look. Very *Twilight*."
The wolf lunged.
He caught her. He caught her *mid-air*, by the ruff of her neck, like she weighed nothing. She was enormous, and snarling, and snapping at his face, and he held her there with one arm, easily, the way Hope might hold a cat.
"Mom!"
"*Relax*." Stiles didn't even look at Hope. He was looking at the wolf, eye to gold eye. "I'm not gonna eat your mom, Hope. She tastes like a dog park." He set the wolf down very gently on the floor. Then he put his palm flat on her head and siphoned, just enough. Her mom's legs folded under her and she dropped heavily onto Hope's rug. She was panting, conscious, but too drained to stand.
"She'll be fine in like twenty minutes," he said. "Probably. I'm not a wolf doctor."
Hope's heart was slamming against her ribs. She knew he could hear it.
"My dad," she said. "My uncle..."
"Uncle's in the fountain. Dad's having a little lie-down. Your aunt already looked like death, so honestly? Hard to tell." He dusted off his hands. "Everybody's fine. Nobody's dead. I didn't even kill anybody tonight at your house. I'm being *so* good."
"You *melted the gate*."
"Your aunt made it really hard! She really went for it! I'm genuinely impressed!" He grinned, and then he stopped grinning. He stood very still in the middle of her room, looking at her. His eyes were starting to bleed red around the edges.
"Hope," he said. "I've got a problem."
"You've got a lot of problems."
"Okay, yes, fair. But this is a *specific* problem." He took a step closer. "Since last night, nothing tastes right. I ate a bouncer. I ate a vampire named Terrence. I ate a witch who tried to *pinch* me. I've eaten like nine people tonight, Hope, and it's all garbage. It's like eating air. Every time I close my eyes, it's just you. Your magic, sitting in my chest, making everything else taste like cardboard."
Hope's mouth went dry. The hook under her ribs was pulling so hard it hurt.
"So here's the deal," he went on. "Either I get more of you, or I keep eating the Quarter until something tastes good again. And I'm pretty sure nothing will. So I'll just keep going. Street by street. Bar by bar." He shrugged. "I don't really care either way. But you asked me last night why I stopped. I'm telling you why I came back."
Hope stared at him.
Nine people. *Tonight*. He'd said it like counting beignets.
"And if I say yes?" she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "If I let you... You'd stop? You'd stop killing people?"
"Tonight?" He tilted his head and thought about it, actually *thought*, like she'd asked him to split a check. "Sure. Tonight. I'm not gonna promise *forever*, Hope. I don't do forever promises. But tonight, if I get you? I won't need anybody else. Nobody else will even taste like anything."
On the floor, her mom made a low, rough sound in her throat. It was a warning, and a plea.
Hope looked at her mom. She looked at the window, where she could hear her father downstairs, dragging himself up off the flagstones, snarling her name.
Then she looked at Stiles.
"Not my magic," she said. "It took too much last night. I could barely stand."
His eyebrows went up. "Then what?"
Hope held out her wrist.
For the first time since she'd met him, Stiles Stilinski didn't have anything to say.
He looked at her wrist. Then he looked at her face. His eyes had gone completely red.
"Hope," he said slowly, "you know what I am, right?"
"You told me. Several times."
"Your blood's gonna have all of it in it. The witch, the wolf, the vampire. All of it." His voice had gone low and rough. "I'm not gonna be able to just take a *little*."
"You stopped last night."
"Last night was *magic*. Blood is..." He swallowed. She watched his throat work. "Different."
"Then stop anyway." She didn't lower her wrist. "You said you'd tell the truth. So tell me the truth. Can you stop?"
He stared at her.
"Yeah," he said finally. "Probably. Maybe. I've never wanted to before."
"Then this is your first time."
His mouth curled up very slowly into something that wasn't quite a grin.
"You're *so* much scarier than your dad," he said.
Then he took her wrist.
His hand was warm. That surprised her. She'd thought he'd be cold, like her father and Uncle Elijah. His thumb pressed right over her pulse point, and he held her arm up like it was something breakable. He looked at her one more time, a long, red, burning look.
Then he bit down.
---
**STILES**
It was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
He'd been drinking blood for months. He'd drunk tourists and vampires and witches and hunters and one extremely confused alligator in a swamp outside Lafayette. He'd thought he knew what blood tasted like. He'd thought it was just food, like everything else.
He'd been *wrong*.
Hope tasted like lightning. Hot and bright, it went straight into his chest and *exploded*. It was witch and wolf and vampire and that old, deep, tangled thing, all twisted up together into something he didn't have a name for. It filled the hole. It filled the *whole* thing, all the way up, every inch of the bottomless hungry dark he'd been carrying around since Beacon Hills. For the first time in months, he felt *full*.
The thread between them went hot and taut. He felt her on the other side of it. Her heart was pounding, and her breath was coming short. She was scared, and she wasn't only scared. She was *curious*. Even now, even with his teeth in her wrist, she was reaching down the thread into him, poking around, looking.
He let her look. He didn't care what she found.
He heard her gasp, felt her knees start to go, and caught her around the waist with his free arm without thinking about it. He held her up against him while he drank. Her hair smelled like sage and chalk and grave dirt from her aunt's spells. Her pulse beat against his lips, slower now. Slower.
*Stop.*
He didn't want to stop. Every single cell in his body screamed at him not to stop. There was more, so much more, and it was *right there*, and she'd *offered*...
*Can you stop?*
*Probably. Maybe.*
Stiles pulled his mouth away from her wrist.
It was the hardest thing he'd ever done. Harder than fighting the Nogitsune. Harder than leaving Beacon Hills. Harder than dying and not staying dead. He stood there in the middle of her bedroom, holding her up, her blood running down his chin, his whole body *shaking*. He breathed, in and out, in and out, until the red haze started to clear.
"Okay," he said hoarsely. "Okay. Okay. Stopped. Look at that. Personal growth."
Hope was leaning against him, her face pale, her eyes half shut. Her wrist was still bleeding. He looked at it for a second, and then he bit his own thumb, pressed it to the wound, and watched it close up.
"Don't tell anybody I did that," he muttered. "Bad for the brand."
The door exploded inward.
Klaus came through it with his eyes blazing gold and his arm still gray to the elbow. Elijah was right behind him, soaking wet. Freya was leaning against the doorframe, barely standing.
They saw Hope, pale and swaying in his arms. They saw the blood on his mouth.
Klaus made a sound Stiles had never heard a person make.
"She's *fine*," Stiles said quickly. "She's fine. Look. Look at her. She's standing. Mostly. She's alive. She offered. I stopped." He stepped back from Hope. Very carefully he steadied her until she had her feet under her, then held up both hands. "See? Hands off. Totally off. We're good."
"Dad," Hope said faintly. "I'm okay."
Klaus wasn't listening. Klaus was coming across the room.
"*Nope*," Stiles said, and went backward out the window.
He landed in the courtyard in a crouch, straightened up, and looked back up at the window. Klaus was framed in it, half out, gold-eyed, murderous. Behind him, just visible over his shoulder, was Hope.
She was holding her wrist. She was looking right at him.
"Thanks for dinner," Stiles called up. "Seriously. Best meal I've had in my *life*. Tell Freya I'm sorry about the gate."
He paused.
"Actually, no, I'm not. Tell her it was delicious."
---
**STILES**
He didn't eat anybody on the way back to the hotel.
He didn't even think about it. He walked past a drunk guy passed out on a stoop on Royal Street, with a pulse so loud and sloppy it sounded like a marching band, and he just kept walking. He wasn't hungry. For the first time in months, he wasn't hungry at *all*.
He lay on the bed in the presidential suite in his bloody shirt, looking up at the ceiling. Greg was still in the other bathtub. Stiles made a mental note to deal with Greg eventually.
He could still taste her. It wasn't fading this time. It was sitting in his chest warm and bright, like a coal that wasn't going out. The thread was still there, stretched across the whole Quarter, humming faintly. On the other end, her heart was beating. It was slower than usual, and tired, but it was beating. She was awake. She was thinking.
She'd gone looking inside him again. He'd felt her do it while he drank, opening cabinets, checking the corners.
He wondered what she'd found this time.
He decided he didn't care.
He mostly didn't care.
Stiles closed his eyes, and for the first time since Beacon Hills, he slept all the way through to morning.
--