PROLOUGE

"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?"

- edgar allen poe

She wasn't going to miss anything about Eichen House.

The entire experience in the solemn environment lacked all hope for its patients, most of them choosing to remain locked in their eight by eight concrete rooms, heavily sedated with medicines and fatigue.

She was not one of them - one of the people who craved for their morning prescriptions, the dose barely enough to keep them hanging on until the next one after evening group.

Isaiah Montgomery was not like the people here.

She stood in the drafty girls' room, staring down idly at the white-capped pill bottle she held in her hand. Her thumb rolled across the dark tiny words as if she wished to wipe away a stain. It was a habit she'd developed in vain of defying her denial, even though she knew such a thing was useless.

ARIPIPRAZOLE

TWO DAILY - ONE BEFORE BED; ONE IN THE MORNING

PRESCRIBED TO ISAIAH E. MONTGOMERY

The salmon colored pills fell against one another, rattling as she stuffed them in her duffel bag along with the rest of her toiletries, her curtain of grease-slicked hair draping itself over her shoulders and stubbornly falling from where she pushed it behind her ears.

If Eichen House was good for anything, it was making her miss all mundane pleasures people, including her past self, took for granted - like the beauty of showering in privacy and getting a haircut.

She ached for many things - the gentle snip of scissors when cutting out something she liked from a magazine; the soft feel of a steering wheel gripped in her hands; the cold trail a slushie left in her throat.

Isaiah exited the bathroom as quickly as she dared, packed bag hiked high on her shoulder. It was doubtful that her parents would let her do anything that involved more than taking her medicine and breathing once she arrived home - if she could even call it that anymore. She wasn't looking forward to going back, but she didn't want to stay here either.

Nothing was changing; she was just migrating from one prison to the next, except that in her next one, the wards were going to make her attend eight torturous hours of high school, because being looked at from underneath a million different microscopes wasn't enough of a punishment.

The room was empty by the time Isaiah returned. Meredith's side was as blank and orderly as it always was when she wasn't in the room. It wasn't like she had much to decorate her side with anyway. Not with all her dead family members and lack of sentimental attachment toward anything. But there was no sign of a struggle this time - no drag in the floor's grime, no scratches marred on the concrete walls. She must have gone to group willingly this time.

For the last time, Isaiah sat on her bed. The mattress reeked of cigarettes and bleach, had horrible lumps and squeaked every time she breathed, but she dreaded the moment when the orderly came to take out to her father, who was no doubt elbow deep in release forms and medical transcripts.

Her feet hurt. After two years in nothing but thick socks and slippers, having tightly laced shoes felt like her feet were locked in lead blocks. The lace of her shirt itched and her jeans squeezed uncomfortably on her thighs and ankles.

She never thought it was possible to miss sweatpants and slippers so much.

The orderly that came to fetch her was the one that usually came to drop off her meals - usually inedible lumps of potato and meat covered in an indescribable sauce.

He was tall, one of the main orderlies that manned the floor. His arms bulged with popped veins and thick muscles underneath scarred dark skin. He hardly ever spoke and walked like the undead. Isaiah wasn't even sure if he had a name.

But he wasn't like the odd comfort of sweatpants and slippers. She wouldn't miss him.

Nonetheless, Isaiah followed without comment, although she was infamous for her sharp tongue and the consequences that undoubtedly followed. She had no problem scowling at the small of his back, however, it being the only spot on him that she could level with, even at her height. The weight of her bag in her clammy hands felt like bricks, weighed down mostly with medications and treatments they said would be necessary for her to take and use. Even after two years, Isaiah remembered a life where her baggage would be in someone else's hand.

Chivalry really was dead.

The stairs took in an eternity in her lead-laced shoes and the weight she carried. It was a quiet evening that Thursday, except for the wailing on the third floor, which never stopped, even late into the night. Unlike her first few months, chills didn't rush down her spine. Nor did goosebumps cover her limbs. Oddly enough, she wondered if she would be able to sleep at night without the continuity of the gurgled cries.

In the dank lobby, her father waited. He was an unsettling sight in his crisp work suit and shiny loafers, looking like he stepped out of The Great Gatsby. A very out of place sight amongst the stained walls and monotonous creatures that lived and worked here.

Her heart ached. The sight of him made her toes curl from where they perspired in her shoes.

He wasn't the one she wanted. Isaiah's heart and mind instantly thought of Liam when thinking of her day of freedom. She wanted two years before, when she was in seventh grade and incompetent with anti-psychotics and group therapies.

Her father only twisted the stabbing icicle in her gut more, pushing it deeper into her intestines and making icy water set her warm insides ablaze with freezing heat.

The despicable feeling only grew worse as she neared, the orderly stiffly moving to the side to allow the father and daughter reunite.

James Montgomery smiled, his lips pulling back to reveal teeth like a shark's. "Darling, we've missed you!"

Isaiah shrugged. She wanted freedom, but not all the accessories that came along with it, like her parents pretending they had no choice not to visit, to avoid take her phone calls, to sidestep her begs to be released.

She would follow in their footsteps, communication no longer a survival skill.

The limousine outside stretched like a festive hearse outside Eichen's gates. Isaiah ignored the driver's offer to take her bags, throwing them into the trunk herself. She had completely given up on the false politeness of males, it grating off her thorn-edged walls.

The only person who could ever understand the desire of Eichen House again in the face of her parents would be Liam, but she had no idea what became of his existence. He could be anywhere, possibly out of state.

The thought of such a possibility made her skin crawl, the ghost in her bones curl up and screech.

It wasn't the only one.

Another one lingered, but it was much farther away than in her veins. Isaiah knew better than to bring up such a haunting, instead choosing to coolly slip her sunglasses over her face to block out her father's face in front of her. Without the sight of him, she could mute him with little to no effort.

Blocking out noises was another forcibly developed skill during her stay. It came in handy when her roommate talked in her sleep every night, and mumbled herself deeper into insanity nearly every day, every moment there weren't massive orderlies hovering over their shoulders.

But the thick dark shades weren't enough to keep the ghost at bay. After months of her existence, Isaiah had learned to accept her presence, no matter how abrupt and disturbing it registered to her.

Logic whispered to her that it was just the effect of living with truly psychotic people. The lady would go away soon, just like her memories of Eichen House would fade with time.

For now, the lady lingered, in a tattered blue dress that hung off her pale and dirty frame, the straps stained by her greasy strands of hair. Despite her wrecked appearance, the lady sat beside Isaiah's father delicately, her filthy hands clasped in her lap, her bare feet crossed at the ankles.

Constantly, she introduced herself as Claudia.

She wasn't doing so now, but she still spoke. Unlike her father's, Isaiah couldn't get rid of hers. She had no choice but the listen. Claudia's voice oozed through her brain like a thick slime, sickly and deceptively sweet, whispered as if everything she spoke was to be taken urgently.

"My son lived there once," she said, her voice void of anything but distance and wistfulness. From where her head had been turned, looking out the tinted windows and at the trees and buildings as they sped past, blurring into one another, she slowly swiveled, until her glassy hazel eyes were staring past Isaiah's cruel facade. They were as blank as fresh notebook paper.

"Please tell him I said hello."

Hello, and welcome to my second Teen Wolf story!

This will be a lengthy mult-chapter, one that I hope to be my main project as it has so far helped me get out of my writing slump that I've been in for a while.

Basically, Isaiah is a girl that Liam has a past with and she has a supernatural occurrence of her own, which gets her tangled up with Claudia, who I thought it would be really fun to write.

The premise of the story is based off a gif set I saw on tumblr about an AU where Lydia was a special type of banshee that could also see ghosts, that including Allison. It showed how Allison went from a friendly sight to a vengeful spirit, as most spirits often do.

This also came to me when thinking about my friend's new story, The Game. Her pen is AlphaBetaSoup, if any of you want to check that out.

I wanted to write something about Liam having a romance, and having one where Lydia sees Claudia wouldn't do that, and this way, with Isaiah being involved with Claudia, it will not only get her in with Liam, but his pack as well considering it is Stiles' mom.

I don't know hoe long this will be, but I have been having a lot of fun thinking about where I want it to go so far. I don't know if I want to put her on the list, or if I want the list to be the one canon thing I ignored while I write this, but we'll see.

Please leave and tell me what you think, and if you're excited to read more!