When Darkness Comes

Lucawindmover

Chapter One

"A New Tomorrow"

"Had a dream of a new tomorrow, If you don't get it, then you don't get it." Five for Fighting "What If"

Scott McCall groaned as he slapped blindly with his right hand, trying to find and silence his ringing phone without having to open his eyes. He managed to knock the device off his side table and onto the floor. With a muttered curse, he disentangled himself from the other warm body in the bed and leaned over to retrieve the now silent phone.

"Who the hell is calling you?" Cora Hale grumbled, grinding her knuckles into her sleep deprived eyes. "I thought everyone knew we were napping."

Scott squinted at his screen. "It's my dad."

"That's just great," she muttered. "The one person who has no clue we were up all night with the full moon."

Scott stood and carried the phone out to the hallway, opting to return the call without Cora's running commentary audible to his father.

Rafael McCall answered on the third ring. "Hello?"

"Hey Dad. Did you need something?" Scott asked, hoping to keep the conversation short. Recovering from the full moon required more energy now that he regularly became a real wolf. And although he, Cora, Isaac, Ethan, and Derek had spent the night in the Beacon Hills Preserve, giving in to the pull of the full moon, none of the students missed school this morning. Thankfully it was Friday, thus the attempt at an afternoon nap.

Agent McCall sounded slightly annoyed at his son's brusque greeting. "I wanted to confirm dinner for tonight," his dad said in a clipped tone. "You always seem to have some last minute reason for cancelling on me and I wanted to know for sure before I make a reservation."

Scott closed his eyes and clenched his fist as he heard Cora curse loudly from the bedroom. She must have heard Rafael's side of the conversation. "Would you believe me if I said I forgot about dinner?"

"I'd say that's more believable than you remembering, actually."

Scott glanced up to the clock in the hallway reading half after four and sighed. "What time were you thinking?"

"Don't you do it, Scott McCall," Cora hissed from the bedroom.

At the same time, Rafael asked, "How about seven? At Luigi's?"

Scott held his hand over the mouthpiece for a moment, answering Cora first with a muttered, "We have to," before addressing his father with, "Yeah, I guess that'll work. We can be there by then."

"We?" his father asked. "Does this mean I'm going to finally meet this elusive girlfriend of yours?"

Mate, Scott silently corrected him. He and Cora were mates, the werewolf equivalent of marriage but without the human ability to undo it. Divorce didn't exist for mates but Scott wouldn't have wanted one anyway. It didn't matter to him that he and Cora mated each other by accident. Sure, the two of them didn't always get along or agree on topics, such as keeping his father in the dark about the werewolf aspects of their lives. She believed they didn't have time to deal with people who didn't know their secrets. Scott wasn't in any hurry to pull his father into the danger associated with possessing knowledge of those secrets.

"Yeah, I'll see if I can get her to come," Scott answered. "I mean, if it's okay with you."

"If it gets you to dinner, I wouldn't even care if you brought Stiles."

"You don't mean that."

"Obviously."

Scott cracked a half-smile against his will, confirmed they would indeed attempt to make it, and ended the call. Without his father consuming half his attention, he could hear Cora grinding her teeth back in the bedroom.

"Absolutely not," Cora said from the bed as Scott slumped against the door frame.

"We need to go," Scott replied. "He's my dad."

"He could be the king of the country for all I care. It's still a no."

"The president?" he asked, pushing away from the doorway.

Cora rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. "Whatever. You know what I mean."

Scott couldn't help himself. He grinned. He loved it when she was mildly annoyed with him. She felt the same way, generally. Their bickering had almost become foreplay, to the annoyance of basically everyone who knew them.

"What if I could convince you?"

Cora's eyes snapped in his direction at the tone of voice with which he asked the question. He could already hear the increased stutter of her heart as the head rose in her cheeks. Her expression hadn't changed but everything else about her, including her over-powering scent, had definitely picked up on what he had in mind.

"There's nothing you could say that'll change my mind," she answered stubbornly even though they both knew her words were more or less useless at this point.

Scott prowled to the foot of the bed, his eyes dark and his smile feral. "I didn't say anything about talking, did I?"

Cora swallowed visibly. Her hands clenched the fabric of her shirt as she continued her obstinate refusal to acquiesce to his request. She closed her eyes as he began a slow crawl up the bed, pausing to lay lingering kisses on each of her knees and the tops of her black denim-clad thighs. He straddled her legs, keeping most of his weight off her as he peeled her arms away from her body. After placing kisses on the palms of each of her hands, he lightly bit the soft skin at her wrist, causing her eyes to blaze open, flashing gold once before darkening with a furrow of her brow.

"You don't play fair," she accused, breathily.

Scott grinned against her wrist, dragging his lips up her forearm to the tender flesh at the inside of her elbow. "I'm not playing," he replied. "We need to go to dinner tonight."

Cora shook her head but Scott recognized the gesture as her giving him permission. She would go but she wouldn't be happy about it. He wondered for a moment if maybe it would be better to let her stay home, rather than allowing her to terrorize his father with her dark brooding all night. But then Cora changed the dynamic of the situation by rolling them, pinning him to the bed with her tiny frame and intense glare.

"Rules."

"Go on."

She leaned forward, softly biting the space beneath his chin where the stubble of his face met the silky skin of his neck. Scott groaned.

"You don't call me your girlfriend," she all but growled against his skin. Cora stubbornly opposed anyone using the term to describe her. Scott couldn't speak so he nodded instead. "And no lying. If your dad asks a question, promise me you'll tell him the truth."

He didn't want to promise. The subjects Scott couldn't be honest with his father about yet numbered in the double-digits. He couldn't admit to the man that his girlfriend lived with him, sharing a bed every night. He couldn't tell his father the reason he didn't get any sleep last night was because he became a literal wolf and spent the evening running through the woods underneath a full moon, hunting deer and rabbits and other things that went bump in the night. He didn't want to tell him the rest of the members of the ever-growing household were almost all werewolves, that Isaac, Derek, and Ethan all actually lived at the house now rather than just hanging out.

But Cora moved on to tug his earlobe between her lips and he was powerless to protest. It did no good for him to complain. He had started the negotiations this way. It was only fair for Cora to turn the tables on him.

Either she didn't notice he hadn't actually answered or she hadn't expected a response because the two of them quickly lost track of what they were supposed to be arguing about. Somewhere between Cora pulling off her shirt and Scott slipping between her thighs, he realized their tendency to turn arguments into sex was probably not healthy. He intended to talk to her about this sometime. However, as her fingernails bit into his back and her heels interlocked behind his waist, he lost his ability to speak.

"So you're telling me the great Lydia Martin has something she actually doesn't know?" Stiles Stilinski snarked to his girlfriend as he flipped another few pages in his U.S. government textbook, searching for the answer to the next question on his take-home test.

He looked up from his book in time to catch her smothering a yawn with the back of her hand. When she realized he'd caught her at it, she waved off the concern written on his face, reaching forward feebly to pull the textbook off his lap. "Is it so unbelievable that I might have forgotten something? I mean, the sheer volume of drugs in my system could bring down a full grown werewolf. The fact that I even have my eyes open is a feat of strength."

Stiles knew she was right and his heart broke all over again, understanding he could do literally nothing to help her right now. The diagnosis of cancer had devastated them. The revelation that the cancer, supernatural in origin with Stiles' own mother ultimately responsible for the spell echo currently well on its way to killing his girlfriend, had almost been too much to shoulder.

"Nope," Stiles replied. He leaned forward and tapped her temple with his index finger. "This here is a steel trap."

Lydia shooed his hand away. "More like a sieve these days."

"Ha! I actually know what that is."

Lydia smiled. "Glad to know Scott's Word-A-Day calendar is elevating the collective vocabulary of the whole pack."

Usually humor helped. Stiles would quip something stupid or sarcastic, throw around vaguely self-deprecating jokes, and Lydia would at the least shake her head with a twinkle in her eyes giving herself away. They built an easy routine of laughter and tears, humor and homework, tests and procedures and so very much sleep.

But they were coming to a breaking point. If the cancer didn't kill her, the treatments for the cancer would.

Lydia yawned a second time and Stiles closed his book and started the process of moving their homework from her bed to the chair in the corner. Most of the time at this point Lydia started protesting and threatened to hit him with things if he didn't stop babying her. Stiles knew things were desperately declining when she sighed with relief and settled back into the pillows instead.

She grimaced slightly as she shifted herself enough for Stiles to climb into bed with her. The hospital staff had stopped trying to keep them out of the same bed. He pulled the blankets up around them though the room was almost unbearably hot to him. Lydia shivered as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her back against his chest. It worried him that her tiny frame felt like bones wrapped in skin and little else.

Stiles started to drift in and out of sleep. Lydia spoke up, startling him. "We shouldn't fall asleep. Deaton and Dr. Nelson will be here soon."

"Mmhmm," he replied, burrowing his face into the back of her neck. Despite all the medicine and the hospital soap and blankets, right here, in this little spot, Lydia still smelled like Lydia.

"Stiles, I'm serious," she continued, pinching his arm lightly to get a real response.

He was awake. He felt conflicted about this Dr. Nelson person though and he would much rather avoid the situation for a bit longer if they could.

Lydia pressed her read back into his hips and he barely smothered a groan. "Mean," he grumbled into her hair. "Totally evil."

"I have your attention though, don't I?"

Stiles slid the lower half of his body away from her, forcing some space between them while simultaneously pressing a kiss to the back of her neck. "Always."

Lydia started to roll to face him and Stiles helped, making sure none of her various wires and such tangled. When she'd settled again, she reached forward and brushed a few stray strands of hair off his forehead. "I can't believe how fast your hair grows," she said with a sad smile. He and the others in the pack had all shaved their heads for her not long ago. He already needed a trim. It was why he'd always kept it buzzed off as a kid. Much easier maintenance.

"What can I say," he replied with a smirk. "Puny human skills."

Lydia tucked her hand back under her chin and stared up at him, thinking. He knew her thinking face anywhere and he never interrupted her if he could help it. Even though he suspected he didn't want to hear those thoughts, he gave her the time she needed to find the words.

"Whatever it is, I have to do it," she finally said in a small voice. The sound matched the diminutive form from which it came, which in itself was strange as Lydia's voice always reverberated larger than life.

"You really think it's a good idea to make sweeping declarations like that?" he asked. "I mean, what if the solution requires a blood sacrifice or something?"

Lydia raised an eyebrow.

Stiles shrugged. "It wouldn't be the first druid ritual to call for blood."

"Okay, as long as it doesn't require anyone else to die for me, I have to do it."

They didn't know what it was yet. Deaton only ever vaguely answered their questions when it came to possible ways to undo the spell causing her cancer.

A soft knock at the door prompted Stiles to slip out of bed to answer it.

Melissa McCall gave Stiles a half-smile and pushed into the room to check Lydia's vitals before letting in Deaton and a petite, blonde-haired woman.

Deaton strode forward and shook Stiles' hand which felt formal, considering the circumstances. It made him feel more awkward than usual.

"Stiles, Lydia, I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Moira Nelson," Deaton said, gesturing to his companion. She smiled a little and nodded to each of them. "She's going to do her best to help us get out of this situation."

"How exactly?" Stiles asked, already fidgeting from side to side, trying not to pace. It drove Lydia crazy when he paced in the small room but fighting the urge to so felt like trying not to breathe, possible but painful and not recommended for long periods of time.

Dr. Nelson clasped her hands in front of her and all Stiles could see as the woman began to speak were her bright red fingernails. "Right now, your abilities as a banshee are tied to the power reservoirs of the nemeton. We can't separate you from that power source without causing you harm."

"Well then that's not an option," Stiles interjected.

"Which is why," the doctor went on, turning to look at Stiles for the first time since she'd entered the room. "We will disconnect Lydia from her abilities first."

After a moment of stunned silence in which Stiles tried to process this information, Lydia spoke up. "I wouldn't be a banshee anymore?"

"You would still be a banshee by blood, but by ability…you'd be perfectly human."

Stiles finally found his voice at this. "Will they come back? Her abilities, would she get them back?"

Dr. Nelson pursed her lips for a moment before answering. "It's possible they'll come back in a changed form. But yes, it's also possible they won't return at all."

Isaac Lahey had known this conversation was coming for a while. He'd felt it in Allison's hesitance to touch him, in her quiet words and inability to make eye contact with him. Something about Allison irreversibly changed during her ordeal on the other side. She'd refused to talk to him about her battle with her aunt Kate, outside of telling him they'd fought one another for control of her body and she'd won. He'd tried not to press her for details but the more time passed, the more he knew she was leaving something out.

When Isaac spoke to Scott about it, the Alpha werewolf assumed Allison's eccentricities were attributed to the face that she'd basically banished her aunt to the abyss. He explained that while Kate had been a total basket case, she and Allison possessed a special familial bond. Allison loved Kate. Having to kill her beloved family member took a toll on her. Isaac deferred to Scott's knowledge, knowing nothing could be done about it now. Kate was gone and Allison lived, working through her feelings while healing physically.

Lydia assured him this was normal too. When Allison dealt with her mother's death, she cut everyone out of her life then as well. Allison mourned alone. When she was hurting, she had no emotional space to accommodate a relationship. It wasn't personal and when she felt capable of engaging with a person again, she'd likely come back to him, ready and whole.

Knowing these things, conferring with two of the people who knew her best, still didn't prepare him for her to actually say the words.

It was the evening of her release, finally. The doctors couldn't explain why her injuries took so long to heal. Of course the pack knew it was because the damage occurred on another plane of existence but they couldn't reveal this to the medical staff.

With the last of the paperwork signed and her discharge instructions in hand, Isaac followed behind Allison and her father, carrying the small tote of belongings she'd managed to accumulate from home.

"Hey Dad, wait a sec," Allison said as they reached the front doors. "Could you take this to the car? I need to talk to Isaac."

Chris Argent took the suitcase from Isaac with a knowing grimace and Isaac knew then their fate was sealed.

"You're breaking up with me, aren't you?" he asked as Chris disappeared around the corner.

Allison sighed and crossed her arms. In a rare move, she actually made eye contact with him for once. "Look, I need some time, okay?"

His stomach turned over. There was nothing he could do. "Time?"

She shrugged. "And space. I just…can't be involved with you right now."

"Do you still love me?" he asked, not actually wanting to know the answer.

"Don't do that," she answered, her face darkening. "Don't make this worse than it already is, okay? This is about me, not about us."

"But it affects me too," he countered, his wolf becoming restless within him. "Breaking up with me isn't just about you."

Allison threw her hands up and turned to leave. Isaac took a few steps forward and grabbed her arm, enough to ask her to stop. She tensed at his touch but for once he didn't immediately let go.

She turned to him slowly with a resigned look on her face. "Look Isaac. I'm going through some adjustments, okay?" she said, placing a hand on his cheek. "You're a good guy. You really are. But I need some time. Can you give me that?"

And of course he could. He would. He had to. He'd give her anything she needed, no matter how much it hurt. He nodded because the words wouldn't come and she leaned up on her toes to kiss his cheek. Then she left, walking briskly into the night and out of his life.

The moment he could no longer see her, fury rose up in Isaac's chest, threatening to overwhelm him. He'd never complained. He was an orphan, a werewolf, had lost an arm and packmates and somehow he managed to hold himself together. While he indulged often in dark humor, making light of the losses he'd suffered, he never truly complained or lamented the hand he'd been dealt.

This might be his breaking point. He started walking with no clear idea of his destination. Home was only a few miles from the hospital but he wasn't ready to call it a night. He just needed to walk.

The wolf within him fought for release. It pushed at his edges, begging him to budge. With hands balled into fists, he stalked down the road, palms wet with blood from claws he could no longer keep in their place.

He never heard the motorcycle.

The sound of his own heart thumping, blood rushing in his ears, masked the noise as the motorcycle overtook him. The sting of the dart hitting his shoulder caught his attention though, prompting him to freeze as the motorcycle shot past him and skidded to a stop, turning with a loud squeal to face him, rider's face hidden by the dark face mask of a helmet.

Isaac pulled the dart from his shoulder without taking his eyes off the motorcycle. He felt the wolfsbane pulsing through him in a dose that should have knocked him entirely off his feet. After the hellish amount of the herb he'd managed to survive while fighting the leshy, he'd discovered himself more or less immune to the substance now.

The culprit on the motorcycle didn't seem aware of this, waiting for him to fall to the ground, an action that was not going to happen.

This is exactly what I need right now, he thought as he crouched, extending his claws and growling at the threat before him. A distraction.

Once the rider realized Isaac wasn't going down, he switched tactics. The bike started toward him again but the rider now had a baton of some sort held firmly in his right hand. Isaac sprang toward the rider as the bike raced toward him, intending to tackle him to the ground and rip him apart only to be hit by the baton and its associated electrical voltage, enough to kill a bull and definitely enough to stun a teenage werewolf.

Isaac hit the ground with a thud, paralyzed as tremors wracked his body. The motorcycle stopped and its rider got off, baton still in hand. Rather than shock him again, a heavy boot swung toward his face and everything went black as the rider kicked him into unconsciousness.

"I took a step hoping you might follow, if you don't get it then you don't get it." Five for Fighting "What If"

A/N: Welcome to the sequel folks! If you haven't read Moving in the Dark, it's in your best interest to go back and read that story first. While there is a little recap throughout to remind everyone of where we left off, you may be lost if you've never read the first story.

This sequel is one I'd planned for a long time. I almost started on it immediately after concluding MitD but I needed to let it marinate a bit. I'm thankful I did because the direction the story is going in now is a much more exciting one. Thank you very much for reading. I'll be waiting anxiously for reviews or PMs to know what you guys think so far.

Luca