# Chapter 3: Shape Shifted
---
**THE THEATER**
Nobody had left, because nobody could.
Kol had found that out in the first ten minutes of the break: every door led back into the theater. Marcel had checked the ones on the other side. Damon had checked the bar, which existed, and was stocked, and which he'd declared the only evidence so far that whoever built this place had a soul.
"I want it on record," Kol said, dropping back into his seat, "that I am not sitting through a second episode of this without knowing what that boy is."
"You'll sit," Rebekah said. "You'll sit and you'll watch, same as the rest of us."
"He said *mate*, Bekah. He said it in his head like he was reading a diagnosis."
"And *frost*," Bonnie said. "Nobody's forgetting the frost."
Klaus hadn't moved from the aisle seat beside Hayley. He had one ankle across his knee, and his fingers were steepled, and he had spent the entire break saying almost nothing, which had put the Mystic Falls side of the room on edge more than any speech could have.
"He's a boy," Elijah said quietly, to his brother, not to the room. "Whatever else he is."
"So was I," said Klaus.
The screen flickered on.
---
**LAHEY HOUSE — NIGHT**
The theater met Isaac Lahey's father properly this time.
They met the glass thrown across a kitchen table, and the shard that opened Isaac's cheek, and the way the boy didn't flinch until after, like flinching was a thing he'd been trained out of. They met the *sorry* and the *look what you made me do* and the *go to the basement*.
Caroline's hand had gone to Josie's arm without either of them noticing.
Then the cut closed.
The father saw it. The theater saw him see it. Isaac's face, in the dark of the kitchen, did something the theater would remember: it *stopped being afraid*.
He ran. The father chased, in the car, down streets that were too quiet. And in an alley off Main Street something dropped from a rooftop onto the hood of the car, and the theater saw it only in pieces: scales, a tail, a slit-pupiled eye at the windshield, a claw through glass.
The screaming stopped fast.
"Okay," Kaleb said, "that's not the werewolf."
"No," said Alaric. His voice had gone flat and professional. "That is not the werewolf."
---
**STILINSKI HOUSE — MORNING**
Sheriff Noah Stilinski was standing at his own back door with a mug of coffee in his hand and a line of salt at his feet, and he had been standing there for about forty seconds.
"Stiles."
"Yeah?"
"Come here a second."
Stiles came, in the doorway from the hall, hoodie on, backpack half-slung, face arranged into *what*.
*Okay. You had all night. You had six hours of not sleeping to think of a story for the salt and you did not think of a story for the salt, because you spent six hours listening to somebody breathe.*
*Ants.*
*Ants is terrible.*
*Ants is what you have.*
"Ants," Stiles said. "Saw a couple by the step. Salt's supposed to—it's a thing, there's a thing, I read it—"
The sheriff looked at the salt line. He looked at his son. He looked, for a moment longer than Stiles liked, at the little hazel twig tucked above the door frame that was very much not something you did about ants.
"Uh huh," he said.
"Google it."
"I'm not going to google it." Noah stepped over the line, carefully, like it might mean something, and put a hand on Stiles's shoulder on the way past. "Kid slept?"
"Yeah. I think so."
"You?"
"Like a *baby*."
"Babies wake up every two hours screaming."
"Then, yes, exactly like a baby."
Hope, in the hall behind them, had heard every word. She'd been up before both of them. She'd looked at the twig too.
*Hazel. Salt. Iron on the windowsills, I'd bet, if I checked.*
*Whoever taught him that wasn't a witch. Witches don't use hazel over a door anymore. That's old. That's* fae *old.*
*Stop. You don't know that. You know what the Salvatore School library said, and half of that was wrong about you.*
"Morning," she said, coming out, and Stiles turned so fast he hit his shoulder on the doorframe.
---
**THE THEATER**
"Ants," said Damon. "Kid's a supernatural whatever, and his cover story is *ants*."
"He's terrible at lying," Elena said, "and he's *fantastic* at lying, and I don't understand how it's both."
"It's both because he's never had to lie to his father before," Alaric said. He was watching the sheriff's back as the man moved through the kitchen. "Look at that man. He knows something's wrong. He's known something's wrong for years. And he's *choosing* not to push, because he's afraid of what pushing would cost him."
Hayley said quietly, "She's already figured out more than the father has."
"She heard the word *fae*," Freya said. "She got there in one night. She's guessing, but she's guessing *right*."
"And she hasn't said a word to him," Klaus observed. "Hasn't confronted him. Hasn't asked." He tilted his head. "Interesting. She's giving him room."
"Or she's waiting," said Marcel, "to see what he does with it."
---
**BEACON HILLS HIGH SCHOOL — LACROSSE FIELD**
Lydia Martin came back to school that morning, and the school stopped.
The theater watched it happen: a girl in heels and a perfect skirt, walking down a hallway lined with people who'd all seen the photos of her naked and bloody in the woods, and holding her chin like none of them existed. Allison beside her, shoulder to shoulder.
"That," Rebekah said, "is a *queen*."
"She's terrified," Caroline said softly. "Look at her hands."
"That's what I said."
On the field, Coach Finstock was screaming something about a scrimmage, and Scott was trying to breathe. Full moon tonight. Everyone could see it on him except the people who couldn't.
"Tonight's gonna be bad," he said to Stiles.
"I know. I got the chains. I got the—okay, I got most of the chains, the hardware guy asked a lot of questions." Stiles was turned half toward the bleachers.
Hope was on the bleachers. Second row. She'd said she'd rather see the school than sit in the front office all morning, which was reasonable, and had chosen a seat with sight lines to every exit, which was not.
*She's watching Isaac.*
*Why is she watching Isaac?*
*Because his father's dead and he's at practice like nothing happened. Because he's got the same thing on him Scott's got. Because she can SMELL it, Stiles, she smelled the omega in ninety seconds, you think she can't smell a fresh bite from thirty feet—*
"Stiles." Scott had gone very still. "It's Isaac. He's—Isaac's one of us."
"I know."
"You *know*?"
"I mean—I mean I *figured*. He's playing like a linebacker. He's been at this school three years and I've never seen him catch a ball with his *face*, look at him—"
Isaac took Scott to the ground on the next play and said something into his ear that made Scott's eyes flash gold for half a second. Stiles saw it.
So did Hope.
So did Coach, who saw nothing, and blew his whistle, and screamed.
And then the sheriff's cruiser pulled up at the edge of the field.
---
**BEACON HILLS HIGH SCHOOL — PARKING LOT**
They took Isaac in for questioning.
Not cuffed. Not yet. But Stiles knew his dad's face, and this was the *there's a dead man and I'm sorry, son* face, and Isaac went with them looking like someone who had *been* in the back of things before and wasn't sure whether this one was better or worse.
"They can't put him in a cell," Scott said. "Tonight. Stiles, if he's in a cell on the full moon—"
"I know."
"He'll kill somebody. Or somebody'll kill *him*—"
"Scott. I *know*."
Derek Hale was leaning against the black Camaro at the end of the lot like it had been placed there for him.
Kol, in the theater, sat up. "Oh, *hello*."
"Behave," Rebekah said. Then, a beat later: "Who *is* that?"
Derek said the things Derek said. That Isaac's father was dead. That Isaac hadn't done it. That there was something else in Beacon Hills, something with a tail, and that a bitten wolf on his first moon in a holding cell full of humans was going to be a headline by morning.
Scott went for it, the way Scott did. Stiles stood with his hands in his hoodie pocket and listened.
And Hope came down the bleacher steps and walked up behind them.
Derek's head turned before she'd said a word. Nostrils flaring, once.
*He can smell her,* Stiles thought, and something in his chest went cold and precise. *He can smell she's not human. He's trying to figure out WHAT.*
*He doesn't get to figure out what.*
"Who's this?" Derek said.
"Nobody. She's nobody. She's staying with us. Long story. Not relevant." Stiles had stepped, without deciding to, half in front of her. "You were saying about the cell."
Derek looked at him. At the step. At the girl behind him who was looking *around* him, unimpressed.
"Hope," she said, and put out her hand.
Derek took it. Held it maybe half a second too long, the way you do when you're getting a read.
"Derek."
*Let go of her hand.*
*Let go of her hand.*
*Let go of her—*
Derek let go. Not because he'd heard anything. Because, for a moment, the parking lot had gotten very *quiet* around Stiles Stilinski, the way a forest goes quiet when something's watching, and Derek Hale had grown up in a forest.
He looked at Stiles again. Longer this time.
"Tonight," he said. "Station. Nine."
And he got in his car.
---
**THE THEATER**
"He *felt* that," Stefan said.
"The wolf?" Elena asked.
"The wolf felt *something*. Look at his face. He doesn't know what it was. He's filing it."
Klaus was leaning forward again. "That one's older than he's playing. Not old, but he's had losses. Watch how he looks at the school. Like he's counting who's left."
Caroline said, "The boy stepped in front of her."
"Yes," said Hayley.
"She's a *tribrid*, and he stepped in front of her to shield her from a *werewolf*, and he doesn't even—he doesn't know she doesn't need it."
"Wouldn't matter if he did," Hayley said. "I've seen that step. Klaus does that step." She didn't look at him. "He'd step in front of a hurricane."
Klaus said nothing, which was agreement.
---
**STILINSKI HOUSE — EVENING**
"Stay here."
"No."
"Hope."
"You said that like a period was going to help." She was already pulling on the jacket with the tear in the shoulder. She'd stitched it herself, that afternoon, in the front office while a counselor tried to find her transcripts. "There's a kid in a cell who's going to lose his mind at moonrise, and you're going to a police station with a man who hands out bites in cemeteries. You're not doing that alone."
"I'm not alone, I have—"
"Scott's going to be chained up in somebody's basement. You told me. You told me *that*, and you thought I'd sit on the couch."
*She's right. She's right and she's better at this than you and if she gets anywhere near that cell when Isaac turns—*
*You'll be there.*
*That's not the point—*
*It's the only point. You'll be there. You've spent seventeen years making sure nobody's ever seen what happens when you're there. Tonight you find out what happens when it matters.*
"Fine," he said. "Fine. But you stay behind me. And if I say run—"
"I'll consider it."
"Hope—"
"I'll *consider* it, Stiles. That's the deal." And she went past him, out the door, and he stood in the hallway for a second looking at the hazel twig above the frame, and then followed.
---
**ARGENT HOUSE — SAME TIME**
The theater watched Allison Argent overhear her grandfather.
Watched her hear the words *the Lahey boy* and *the station* and *tonight*, and watched her father not argue, and watched her understand what Gerard was, all the way down, for the first time.
Watched her text Scott, and then Stiles, and get one back from Stiles that said only: *on it. stay away from ur grandfather.*
"Good girl," Elijah murmured.
"She's going to shoot someone," Alaric said. "I've seen that expression on my daughters."
"Which one?" Caroline asked.
"Both. On separate occasions. It never ends the way I want."
---
**BEACON HILLS SHERIFF'S STATION — NIGHT**
The plan, such as it was, was Derek's.
"The deputy at the desk. You distract her, I get the keys from your dad's office."
"*I* distract her?"
"You're a lot of things, Stiles. Distracting's the main one."
"You're prettier."
Derek looked at him.
"Objectively. I'm not—it's an *observation*. You've got the whole—" Stiles gestured at Derek's entire body. "Thing. Go be a thing at her."
Derek was a thing at her. The theater got to watch the most dangerous werewolf in Beacon Hills lean on a front desk and smile like it hurt him and ask about the woman's *day*, and Kol laughed so hard Rebekah threw her program at him.
Stiles and Hope went down the hall.
*Keys are in the top drawer. Dad keeps a spare set because he lost the main set in '09 and never lived it down. Get keys, get Isaac out the back, get him to Derek before the moon crests. Twenty minutes, tops. Simple.*
The top drawer was empty.
*Not simple.*
"Stiles." Hope's hand on his arm. Low. "Someone's already back there."
He hadn't heard it. She had. Footsteps, the wrong cadence for anyone on shift, coming from the holding cells.
They went. Hope on his left, a half step behind, exactly where he'd asked, which meant she was humoring him.
The hall to holding was dark. The overhead had been cut. And at the end of it, in the wash from the exit sign, a man in a deputy's uniform that didn't fit him at the shoulders was fitting a syringe with something purple and slow.
*Wolfsbane. Argent's man. He's going to kill a sixteen-year-old in a cell and call it a seizure.*
Stiles said, before he could stop himself, "Hey."
The man turned.
What happened next happened fast, and the theater saw it the way Stiles saw it: the man's hand coming around, the syringe glinting, the *bad angle*, the fact that Hope was behind him and the syringe was coming *past* him—
Stiles took the hit.
Not the syringe. The fist. He turned his body into it, caught the man's forearm on his ribs, felt something in his side go *bright*, and let himself go down, because that's what a human does, that's what a skinny kid with a big mouth does when a grown man hits him in the dark.
*Fine. That's fine. Ribs. Ribs heal. She's behind you, she's still behind you—*
She was not behind him.
Hope had stepped over him—*over* him, like he was a low fence—and taken the man's wrist in one hand and turned it, and the syringe hit the floor, and the man made a noise like he'd never had his wrist turned before by anyone, let alone a hundred-and-fifteen-pound girl in a stitched jacket.
*What—*
She put him into the wall. It was not a *hard* wall-put. It was a very *precise* one, the kind you learn from someone who's done it a lot and wants you to be able to do it in your sleep.
"Stay down," she told him, and he stayed down.
And then the cell door behind them screamed open on hinges that were never meant to move that way, and Isaac Lahey came out of the dark with his eyes gold and his face gone wrong.
---
**THE THEATER**
"*That's* my girl," Hayley said, half on her feet.
"That was clean," Marcel said, appreciative. "That was a *clean* wrist turn."
"That was Freya's wrist turn," Rebekah said.
"That was *my* wrist turn," Freya said. "I taught her that when she was twelve."
Klaus wasn't celebrating. His eyes were on Stiles, on the floor.
"He took the hit," he said. "He *let* himself take it. He could have—we've all seen what he can do. He let a man hit him in the ribs so she wouldn't see."
"And she walked right over him," Damon said. "Kid's gonna have to update his whole model."
"He's about to," said Landon quietly. "Look."
---
**BEACON HILLS SHERIFF'S STATION — CONTINUOUS**
Isaac was fast.
First moon, no control, the man on the floor smelling of wolfsbane and Argent, the girl who smelled of *something* he had no name for, the boy—
He went for the girl.
He went for Hope, and Hope's hand came up, and Stiles, on the floor, holding his ribs, saw her eyes.
*Gold.*
Not Scott's gold. Not Isaac's gold. Something *ringed*, something with a second colour under it, something that looked like it had been gold for a long time before it was anything else.
*She's a wolf.*
*She's not JUST a wolf. That's not—there's something else in there, I can FEEL it, that's a wolf with something wrapped around it—*
Isaac's claws were already in the air. Hope was fast, but the hall was narrow, and there was a man on the floor behind her, and she'd have to *choose*—
And Stiles stopped choosing.
He didn't stand up. He didn't say a word. He didn't do anything a camera would have caught. He just put his hand flat on the concrete floor, and he *asked*.
Isaac Lahey stopped in the air.
Not slowed. Stopped. Mid-lunge, a foot off the ground, claws six inches from Hope's face, like a video somebody had paused. His eyes went wide and gold and confused. The overhead light that had been cut flickered on, buzzed, and burst.
Half a second.
Then Derek Hale came around the corner, saw a werewolf hanging in the air, and did not have time to process that before instinct took him, and his eyes went red, and he *roared*.
The sound hit Isaac like a wall. Whatever was holding him let go, at the exact same instant, and he fell, and rolled, and came up on his knees with his face human and shaking and staring at Derek like a dog that's finally found the hand that feeds it.
"How," Isaac whispered, "did you do that?"
"I'm the Alpha," Derek said.
But he wasn't looking at Isaac.
He was looking at the light fixture. At the glass on the floor. At Stiles Stilinski, still sitting against the wall with a hand pressed to his ribs and the other hand flat on the concrete and an expression on his face that was doing an extremely good impression of a kid who'd just been punched.
The hall smelled like ozone. Like the air after lightning.
Derek breathed in, slow.
"You okay?" he said. Flat.
"Peachy." Stiles got his feet under him. "Ribs. Guy hits like a *truck*. Isaac, hey, buddy, you good? You look good. You look great, actually, considering—"
"Stiles."
"Yep."
Derek held his eyes a beat longer. Whatever he was going to say, he didn't say it. He looked at Hope, whose eyes were their normal blue now, and whose face gave him nothing, and who had picked the wolfsbane syringe up off the floor and pocketed it like evidence.
"We're leaving," Derek said. "Both of you. Before your father gets here."
---
**THE THEATER**
"He *stopped* him," Bonnie said. "He stopped a werewolf mid-air with his *hand on the floor*—"
"Telekinesis," Freya said. "But not—that wasn't a spell. There were no words. He *asked*."
"Asked *what*?" Elena said.
"The building. The ground. I don't know." Freya's hands were pressed together in her lap. "Bonnie. You felt that?"
"I felt it." Bonnie's voice was strange. "It felt like the ground *liked* him."
Klaus had gone very still again, and this time it wasn't rage. Hayley knew all his stillnesses. This was the one he'd had at the docks in New Orleans, watching someone do something he hadn't known was possible.
"He didn't move," Klaus said. "He didn't stand, he didn't shout. He didn't *want* anyone to see, and so he arranged it so that no one could prove they had. The wolf roared and it *covered* him." A pause. "He let Derek take the credit."
"And Derek knows," Stefan said.
"Derek *suspects*," Elijah corrected. "Which, for a man like that, is far more dangerous."
"She saw it," Josie said quietly.
Everyone looked at the screen. At Hope, in that hallway, with a syringe in her pocket and her face carefully blank.
"She saw everything," Josie said. "And she saw *him* see *her*. They both know now."
Landon, at the end of the row, said nothing. But he'd unclenched his hands from the armrest at some point during the roar, and hadn't put them back.
---
**LAHEY HOUSE — BASEMENT — SAME NIGHT**
The theater watched Scott McCall find the freezer.
The one in the basement with the scratches on the inside of the lid. The one with the padlock. The one where a boy had been put for grades, for glasses, for breathing wrong.
Watched Scott stand there with his face doing something terrible.
Watched Chris Argent come down the stairs behind him with a gun he never raised, and say the quiet things Chris Argent said. About a boy who'd been abused, and a bite that turned a victim into a weapon. About how monsters got made. About how he'd been to enough basements like this to know.
"I don't want to be right," Chris said.
Scott said, "Then don't be."
Caroline was crying, quietly, in a way she'd deny. Alaric had his arm around her. He'd been to basements too.
Then Scott, alone, because the moon was cresting and he couldn't trust himself anywhere else, climbed into Isaac's freezer and pulled the lid down over his own face and locked himself in.
And Allison Argent came down the stairs and sat with her back against it, and talked to him through the steel until morning.
"That boy," Elena said softly, "is going to break my heart."
"He already did," said Caroline.
---
**THE PRESERVE — DEREK'S PLACE — LATER**
The old Hale house didn't have a door anymore, really, so Derek had left the frame open.
Isaac was upstairs, sleeping like something that had never slept safely before and didn't know it was allowed. Stiles had driven. Hope had ridden shotgun, and said nothing the whole way, which Stiles had found somehow worse than any version of the conversation he'd rehearsed.
Now Derek stood in the ruin of his childhood with his arms crossed, and looked at Stiles, and said:
"What was that."
"Which part? The hunter, the light, the—"
"Stiles."
"The light was old. Those fixtures are from like, 1970, my dad's been asking for—"
"*Stiles.*"
*Here it is. You knew it was coming. He's not stupid. He grew up around magic, his mother was an Alpha with a whole territory, he's smelled the ozone before and he knows what it means.*
*You could tell him.*
*You could tell him right now and it'd be over. The hiding. Seventeen years. Just—done.*
*And then he'd look at you the way she said. And then Scott would. And then Dad—*
*No.*
"I don't know what you think you saw," Stiles said, and his voice was completely steady, which was itself the most unnatural thing he'd done all night. "But I got punched in the ribs by a guy who was about to murder a kid, and then Isaac went crazy, and then *you* roared, and then he stopped. That's the story. That's the story I'm gonna tell my dad, and it's the story you're gonna tell your new puppy upstairs, and it has the benefit of being *true*."
Derek didn't blink.
"You smell different," he said.
"I got *hit*—"
"Not the blood." Derek stepped closer. Not threatening. Reading. "You've smelled like the same thing since the day I met you. Adderall and anxiety and that Jeep. And tonight, in that hallway, for about half a second, you smelled like—" He stopped. Searched for it. "Like the woods. When I was a kid. Before the fire. Like something that lives out there and doesn't come in."
Nobody said anything.
Hope, in the open doorframe, had gone still.
"I don't know what you are," Derek said. "But I'm going to find out. And when I do, I want to know whose side you're on."
Stiles looked at him for a long time.
Then he looked past him, at Hope in the doorway. At the torn shoulder she'd stitched herself. At the syringe-shaped bulge in her pocket. At the girl who'd walked over him to break a man's wrist, and whose eyes had been gold and *something else* in the dark.
*Whose side.*
*That's easy. That's the only easy question anyone's asked me all night.*
"Hers," he said.
And walked out.
---
**THE THEATER**
The silence in the theater lasted a full five seconds, which for this group was a geological age.
"Oh, *no*," Rebekah said finally. "Oh, no, that was *good*."
"He said it to a *werewolf*," Kol said. "An *Alpha*. He looked an Alpha in the eye and said *hers* and walked out like he owned the building."
"He didn't say it for the Alpha," Elijah said. He was watching Hope, frozen in the frame, on the screen. "He said it for her. He simply chose not to look at her when he did."
Hayley had turned to Klaus. "Say something."
Klaus was watching the screen the way he'd once watched Hope's ultrasound. Like the thing on it was a fact he had to reorganize his entire world around.
"He's going to get himself killed," he said. "For her. Without a second thought. And he's going to make certain no one ever knows he's the one who did it."
"That bother you?" Damon asked.
Klaus turned, slowly, and looked at him.
"It *terrifies* me," he said. "I know exactly how that ends. I've *been* that." He turned back. "But I'd rather she had it than not."
---
**STILINSKI HOUSE — LATE**
Hope didn't go to the couch.
She followed him down the hall, and stood in his bedroom door, and watched him pull his hoodie over his head with the careful slowness of someone whose ribs were cracked, and said:
"Let me see."
"It's fine—"
"Stiles. I've set more bones than you've—" she stopped. "*Let me see.*"
He let her see.
Purple, spreading, two ribs at least. She put her hand flat over it, and he went rigid, and she felt the heat under her palm that shouldn't have been there in a human, the bone already knitting, hours ahead of any schedule.
She didn't say anything about the heat.
He didn't say anything about her eyes.
"You stepped over me," he said instead, quiet.
"You were on the floor."
"I was on the floor on *purpose*."
"I know." She hadn't taken her hand away. "I saw the angle. You turned into it so it wouldn't reach me." Her thumb moved, once, over the bruise. "Nobody's done that for me since I was a kid."
*Since Dad. Since Mom. Since anyone.*
*He did it without thinking. He did it and then he made himself look weak to sell it, and then he stopped a werewolf in the air to cover for me, and then he told an Alpha—*
*Hers.*
*He said hers.*
*He doesn't even know what I am, and he said hers.*
"Whose side," Stiles said, not looking at her. "You heard that."
"I heard it."
"I meant it. You don't have to—it doesn't have to mean anything to *you*. I'm not asking for—" He stopped. Started again, and his voice had gone small and careful in a way she hadn't heard from him before. "I just need you to know where I'm gonna be standing. That's all. So you don't have to wonder."
Hope Mikaelson, who had been raised by the most dangerous family on the planet and had learned to trust exactly none of the things people said to her about protection, stood in a sheriff's son's bedroom with her hand on his ribs and did not know what to do with that.
So she did the only thing she'd been taught.
"Okay," she said. "Then I'll stand next to you."
She took her hand away. Went to the door. Stopped.
"Your eyes," she said, without turning around. "In the hallway. When the light went. They weren't brown."
He didn't answer.
"Mine weren't blue," she said. "So. We'll talk. Not tonight."
"Not tonight," he agreed.
She went down the hall. The very good couch creaked.
Stiles lay back, careful of the ribs that were already halfway healed, and stared at the ceiling.
*She'll stand next to me.*
*She doesn't know what that means. She doesn't know what she just said to. She thinks she's saying it to a boy.*
*Doesn't matter.*
*She said it.*
Somewhere out in the preserve, past the Hale land, a stump the size of a truck hummed once in the dark, the way it hadn't since he was thirteen.
He didn't put it back.
---
**THE THEATER**
The screen went dark.
Josie was the one who broke it, finally, in a small voice: "They're going to be *so* bad at this."
"Yes," Freya said, and she was almost smiling. "They are."
Klaus stood. Stretched, like a man who'd been sitting a long time, which was a lie. Looked at the black screen.
"Derek Hale," he said, to no one, "is going to find out what that boy is."
"So are we," said Kol.
"Not tonight," Elijah said.
And the lights came up.
---
*End of Chapter 3.*