Chapter 3 — Coffee at Four in the Morning
The kitchen light was too bright, so Stiles turned it off and turned on the one over the stove instead, and the room went small and yellow around the counter.
Hope sat on a stool with Mira in the crook of one arm and watched him measure coffee into the filter with a spoon he clearly did not need, because he did it twice and then dumped one of them back in the bag.
"You're stalling," she said.
"I'm measuring."
"You're stalling with a spoon."
"It's a load-bearing spoon." He put the pot on and leaned back against the counter with his arms folded and did not look at her for a second. "How long do we have before she wakes up again?"
"Ninety minutes if we're lucky. Forty if I say something she doesn't like."
"Great. So I've got forty minutes to explain the entire thing."
"You've got as long as it takes," Hope said. "I'm not going anywhere. That's kind of the whole point of the last four days."
The coffee maker started making the noise coffee makers make.
Stiles pushed off the counter, opened a drawer, and took out a paring knife.
Hope's eyebrows went up.
"Okay," she said.
"It's faster than talking."
"I've been told that before and it has never once been true."
"It's gonna be true tonight." He set the knife on the counter and held his left hand out flat over the sink, palm up. "I'd rather you see it than sit there deciding how much of it I'm exaggerating."
"Stiles."
"Hope."
"You have a three-month-old in the room."
He stopped.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that's — okay. That's a fair note." He put the knife back in the drawer and shut it. "Noted. Filed. Good parenting."
"Thank you."
"I'm two hours in and I'm already doing better than some."
"Sit down and use words," Hope said, "like a person."
He sat down on the other stool.
He turned it so he was facing the dark window over the sink instead of facing her, and Hope let him do that.
"I was seven," he said.
The coffee maker hissed.
"We lived in the same house. My mom was still — she was fine then, that was before any of it. And there was a kid down the street, Kyle, he had one of those bikes with the streamers on the handlebars and he was extremely proud of it, which, fine. And I was standing at the end of our driveway waiting for him."
"Okay."
"And Mrs. Ferrell backed out of her garage."
Hope didn't say anything.
"She was seventy-one," Stiles said. "She had a Buick the size of a boat and she could barely see over the wheel, and she came out of that garage and she did not look, and I heard my mom yell my name from the porch and that's actually the last thing I remember hearing in order."
He turned the empty mug on the counter a quarter turn.
"I went under it," he said. "Not — people say *hit by a car*, that's not what happened. I went under the back of it and the rear wheel went over my chest and stopped, because she panicked and hit the brake, and it sat on me."
"Stiles."
"Rear tire. On my sternum. With a seventy-one-year-old woman screaming in the driver's seat and my mother trying to lift a Buick off her kid with her bare hands." He said it evenly. "That's not a thing anybody survives. Not a seven-year-old. Not anybody."
He turned the mug back.
"And I remember the asphalt being warm," he said. "And I remember thinking it was strange that it didn't hurt. That's it. That's the whole memory of it. It didn't hurt."
"What happened."
"She got the car off me. Somebody helped her, I think, I don't know, I've never asked. And my mom turned me over and I had blood coming out of my mouth and my shirt was — " he made a small motion with his hand — "and she was holding my face and saying my name, and I said *Mom, I'm okay.*"
The coffee maker finished and clicked.
"Because I was," Stiles said. "I sat up. On the driveway. In front of her and Mrs. Ferrell and Kyle from down the street, I sat up and my chest was fine, and my shirt was ruined and there was blood on the ground and there was not one single thing wrong with me."
Hope was very still.
"They took me to the hospital anyway," he said. "Full workup. X-rays. They kept me overnight because they were sure they were missing something and nobody wanted to be the guy who sent home the kid who got run over. And in the morning a doctor came in with a clipboard and told my parents I'd been very, very lucky. That the tire must have caught the shoulder, that kids are flexible, that these things happen. A *miracle*, he said. He used that word."
"And your mother?"
Stiles finally looked over at her.
"My mom looked at me across that hospital bed," he said, "and she knew."
"Knew what?"
"That it wasn't luck." He picked up the mug again and didn't drink from it. "She didn't say it in front of the doctor. She waited until we were home and my dad went back to work and she sat me down on the couch and she asked me if it had ever happened before. Anything like that. Anything at all."
"Had it?"
"I told her about the bee sting," Stiles said. "I was five, I got stung on the roof of my mouth, and my throat closed up, and I couldn't breathe, and I sat down in the grass and waited for it and then after about a minute it just — stopped. It opened back up. I never told anybody because I was five and I figured that's what bees did."
Hope let out a breath.
"And she didn't say anything when I told her that," he said. "She just sat there for a really long time. And then she said, *don't tell your father.*"
"She said that?"
"Word for word."
"Why?"
"I've had eleven years to think about that," Stiles said, "and I've got about four answers and I don't like any of them."
He set the mug down.
"The best one is that she knew what it would do to him. My dad's whole personality is keeping people alive. It's the entire job, it's the entire man. You tell him his kid can't be killed and either he doesn't believe you, which breaks something, or he does, which breaks something else."
"And the worst answer?"
Stiles was quiet for a second.
"That she recognized it," he said.
Hope shifted Mira slightly. "Her side."
"Her mother, her mother's mother. There's a town in her family's history that isn't on maps anymore, and there's a lot of women in those stories who should've died and didn't, and every single one of them died eventually anyway, so it's not — " he moved his hand — "it thinned out. Whatever it was. It got thinner every generation and by the time it got to my mom it was basically nothing."
"And then it got to you."
"And then it got to me whole," Stiles said. "Yeah."
He got up and poured two coffees and set one in front of her without asking how she took it, then put the milk and the sugar bowl next to it, which was its own kind of answer.
"She died," he said, with his back to her. "Frontotemporal dementia. It took three years. She forgot who I was about eight months before the end and she was afraid of me for the last four."
"Stiles."
"And I sat in that room and watched her do it," he said, "and I couldn't give her one day of it. Not one. Whatever I've got, it doesn't share. It doesn't transfer, it doesn't help, it just sits in me doing nothing while everybody else does what people do."
He turned around.
"That's the part," he said. "That's the actual part. Everybody hears *can't die* and they think it's a superpower. It's not a power, Hope, it doesn't do anything. It's a fact about me. It's like being tall."
"It is not like being tall."
"It's exactly like being tall," he said, "except when I'm in a room with my friends and something comes through the door, I'm the only one who already knows how the night ends for me. And I have to stand there and pretend I'm scared the same way they are."
"Are you?"
"Am I what?"
"Scared. The same way they are."
Stiles leaned on the counter across from her.
"No," he said. "I'm scared for them. That's different and it's worse."
Hope wrapped her free hand around the coffee.
"Who knows?" she asked.
"Nobody."
"Nobody."
"My mother's dead. So nobody."
"Not your father."
"No."
"Not Scott."
"Especially not Scott," Stiles said, and something went across his face. "Scott got bitten in a field when we were sixteen because I dragged him out there looking for a body. And he screamed. I heard him scream, I watched him bleed, I watched him spend two years terrified of himself. And all of that started because I wanted to see something interesting." He shook his head. "You don't get to walk up to a guy like that and tell him you were never once in any danger. Not on the same night. Not on any night."
"So you've been lying to him since you were sixteen."
"Since I was seven," Stiles said. "He was there for the bee sting."
Hope put the coffee down.
"That's eleven years," she said.
"Yeah."
"By yourself."
"Yeah."
She was quiet a moment. Mira made a small sound and resettled.
"Show me," Hope said.
"You said not in front of — "
"Not the knife." She held out her free hand, palm up. "Give me your hand."
He put his hand in hers.
Hope closed her fingers around his wrist and shut her eyes, and Stiles felt something move under his skin — not pain, not heat, a pressure, like standing in a doorway when a door slams somewhere else in the house.
Then it stopped.
Hope opened her eyes. Her pupils were blown wide and her mouth had gone tight at the corners.
"What," Stiles said.
"I do that to read a bloodline," she said. "I've done it to a werewolf, a vampire, my uncle, a body in a morgue, and a girl in my class who thought she was human and wasn't."
"And?"
"I've never done it to something that wasn't there," Hope said.
She let go of his wrist.
"There's no thread," she said. "Every living thing has a line running back. Parents, ancestors, a species, *something*, you follow it and it goes somewhere. Yours goes back about two feet and stops. Not cut. Not hidden. There's nothing there to cut."
"What does that mean?"
"It means the magic that measures what you are can't find a category to put you in," Hope said. "It means nothing that was ever written down is looking at you."
The stove light hummed.
"Well," Stiles said. "That's not ominous."
"Don't."
"Little bit ominous."
"Stiles."
"Sorry." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Sorry. That's — that's how I talk when I'd rather be screaming."
"I know," Hope said. "I noticed that in New Orleans too."
She stood up, carefully, with Mira along her arm, and came around the counter and stopped in front of him.
"Then here's the thing you need to hear," she said, "and then I'm going to bed, because I have driven thirty-one hours and I am about to fall over."
"Okay."
"You've been carrying this since you were seven years old and you told a girl you've known for one week and four months about it in a kitchen at four in the morning." She looked up at him. "That was the right choice. I'm not going anywhere. And you're not doing the next eleven years by yourself."
Stiles opened his mouth.
"Don't be funny," Hope said.
He closed it.
"Okay," he said.