They pushed through the bushes. Scott stopped when they reached the small clearing where Sean had encountered the Alpha. The ground was torn up. A piece of Sean's jacket, shredded as he fled, hung from a branch. And there on the ground... next to the stone, was a large pool of blood beginning to dry.
"Sean!" Stiles wailed, the desperation in his voice echoing through the forest.
A short distance away, at the base of a fallen tree trunk, Sean lay unconscious. He was covered in mud, and his t-shirt was torn by that deep claw strike on his chest. His face was pale as a sheet, but worst of all were those distinct, bruised teeth marks on his shoulder.
Scott knelt beside his brother, his hands shaking as he checked his pulse. "He's alive... but it's very weak. Stiles, his heart is racing!"
Stiles caught his breath as he looked at the wound on Sean's chest. "What happened to him? This... this isn't an animal attack, Scott. Those marks... are they the same as yours?!"
As Scott looked at the bite on his brother's shoulder, Derek's words rang in his ears: "The bite is a gift." But for Sean, this wasn't a gift; it was a battle for survival. In trying to save his brother, Sean had become trapped in the world of the monster his brother had become.
Scott turned to Stiles. "These marks are the same as the ones I had the first day I was bitten..."
When Stiles lifted the jacket he was pressing against the claw wound on Sean's chest, he froze at the sight. "Scott..." he said, his voice trembling. "Look at this. This... this is a claw mark! He's badly hurt, Scott!!"
When Scott leaned in to look, the three deep gashes on Sean's chest were twitching slightly as if they were alive. Scott's eyes widened in horror. "These marks... he must have fought the Alpha. Stiles, we have to get him to the hospital right now! He could be dying!"
"No!" Stiles shouted, grabbing Scott's arm firmly. "We can't go to the hospital, Scott, get your head together! If these wounds start closing in front of your eyes ten seconds from now, how are you going to explain that to Melissa? Or to the doctors? They'll quarantine him, run experiments on him. Do you want to turn Sean into a lab rat?"
Scott looked desperately at his brother's pale face. "But he needs help! He's losing blood, Stiles!"
Stiles' mind was working like a computer. Suddenly, his eyes lit up. "The clinic! Scott, the place where you work! Deaton's clinic. It's safe, there are medicines, and most importantly... it's the only place where no one will ask questions and no one is around. Deaton was going to keep the shop closed today, right?"
Scott thought for a moment and realized Stiles was right. "Okay, you're right. We have to go there."
Scott picked Sean up as if he had no weight at all. As Sean's head fell onto Scott's shoulder, a small amount of blood leaked from his mouth. The pair ran through the brush toward the Jeep. Once they laid Sean on the back seat, Stiles jumped into the driver's seat and began driving toward the clinic, burning the tires.
On the way, Scott held his brother's hand in the back seat. He noticed that blood was still flowing from Sean's hand and chest, showing no signs of healing. For a moment, Scott couldn't breathe.
"Drive faster, Stiles!" Scott roared. "We're running out of time!"
The Jeep screeched to a halt in front of the clinic. Scott practically tore the door off its hinges and ran to the entrance with Sean on his back. Instead of wasting time looking for keys, Stiles watched Scott burst the door open with a single shoulder blow. It was pitch black inside, and that familiar sterile smell of medicine didn't feel comforting at all this time.
"Turn on the lights, Stiles!" Scott shouted as he laid Sean on the metal exam table.
When the lights flickered on, the scene became even more horrific. Sean's white t-shirt had turned completely crimson. With trembling hands, Scott looked again at the claw marks on his brother's chest. "Why isn't it healing?" he murmured, his voice tearful. "Mine started closing instantly. Why isn't he healing?!"
Stiles answered as he rummaged through the cabinets of medical supplies: "Maybe every body doesn't react the same way, Scott! Or... or maybe that Alpha thing hurt him more than it hurt you." Stiles returned to the table with bandages and antiseptics. "Okay, first we have to stop this bleeding."
Scott took Sean's ice-cold hand. At that exact moment, Sean's body suddenly went rigid on the metal table. His eyes were closed, but his chest began to rise and fall with a rasping sound. "Stiles, look!" Scott said in terror. Small, black claws had begun to emerge from Sean's fingertips. But this was less a transformation and more like a defense mechanism of his body. The bleeding continued, but the veins around the wound began to take on a pitch-black color.
"Is this... is this a good thing?" Stiles asked, backing away.
"I don't know," Scott said, trying to feel Sean's pain within himself. "But something is going wrong. Sean's heart is slowing down, Stiles... We're losing him!"
Scott realized there was no time to lose. Gathering all the composure he had learned in veterinary medicine, he began to stitch Sean's shredded chest. Though his hands shook at first, he acted with a surgeon's precision when his brother's life was at stake. He stitched the wounds and bandaged them tightly. Then, he poured various antiseptic medicines over the stitches.
A short time later, a miracle occurred; Sean's heart began to beat vividly and strongly as before. Scott and Stiles took a deep breath. They carefully carried Sean to the Jeep, took him to the McCall house, and laid him in the bed in Scott's room.
Sean showed no signs of waking up. Stiles began to pace the room, muttering anxiously: "Okay, we stitched him up, we brought him home, but he's still not waking up, Scott. What if he doesn't recognize us when he wakes? What if he's turned into something else entirely?"
As Sean slowly regained consciousness, the tense silence in the room was suddenly broken. As if waking from a nightmare, Sean sat up in bed, gasping, and shouted, "SCOTT!"
Scott immediately rushed to his brother's side, holding him by the shoulders to calm him down. "I'm here, Sean! I'm here, calm down."
Sean blinked and looked around. When he saw Scott's face, he gave a deep, relieved breath. "You're... okay. Thank God, I thought something happened to you," he said, his voice cracking. He hadn't yet realized the gravity of his own situation.
Then his eyes shifted to Stiles, who was waiting in the corner of the room with his hands in his pockets, practically holding his breath. Stiles' face was white as a sheet, and he watched Sean in terror. Sean smiled slightly, as if trying to lighten the mood.
"Why are you guys looking so worried? Stiles, buddy... why is your face like a frog that fell off a roof? Hahaha! I guess I just got roughed up a bit," he said, letting out a weak laugh.
Stiles couldn't even try to smile. He slowly approached the bed and spoke in a trembling voice: "Sean... don't you remember anything? That wasn't just being 'roughed up.' That... that thing bit you, Sean."
This sentence sent a cold chill through the room. As soon as Stiles uttered the word "bitten," images from the previous night flashed through Sean's brain like a film strip: the dark forest, those massive red eyes, the teeth sinking into his shoulder, and that claw shredding his chest...
With the memory, the curtain of adrenaline dropped, and all the pain that had been suppressed until that moment suddenly hit his body. Sean's face contorted in pain, and he clutched his stitched chest with his hands.
"Ah! Shit..." Sean groaned, gritting his teeth. Those deep gashes on his chest began to sear as if burning from the inside. "It's like... like there's something inside me. Like acid is running through my veins."
Scott put his hand on his shoulder as if to soothe his brother's pain, but Sean recoiled in agony at that moment. Those bruised veins in the bitten area began to throb as if they were about to burst out.
As Sean collapsed back onto the bed in pain, the air in the room changed instantly. While Scott and Stiles looked at each other, not knowing what to do, a strange, crackling sound began to come from Sean's bandaged chest.
"Sean, calm down! Take a deep breath!" Scott shouted, but Sean's eyes had rolled back from the pain.
At that moment, something incredible happened. From under the bandages on Sean's chest, cracking sounds came as if a skin-shedding was occurring. Those sturdy stitches that Scott had put in with so much effort at the clinic began to pop one by one, as if forced by an invisible power.
"What's happening?!" Stiles shouted, backing away.
Scott reached his hand toward the point where the stitches were popping, but he froze at what he saw. Those deep, bloody gashes on Sean's chest were closing in seconds, as if fast-forwarding a video. The blood was clotting, the skin was renewing itself, and it left not a single scar behind.
Sean's pained groan stopped instantly. His body relaxed, and his breathing became regular. The boy who had been in the throes of death moments ago now looked vigorous, as if he had never been injured at all.
Sean slowly moved his hand to his chest, feeling the smooth skin beneath the bandages. He opened his eyes in astonishment. "The pain... it's gone. It stopped all at once."
Stiles pointed a trembling finger at Sean. "Scott, that happened even faster than it did with you! His body literally fired the stitches out like bullets!"
Scott looked at the bite mark on his brother's shoulder. The bite had also completely healed, but the skin around it remained encircled by a faint purple halo. "This isn't normal, Stiles. Sean... how are you? How do you feel?"
Sean slowly got out of bed. When his feet touched the floor, it was as if gravity had lightened for him. "It's like..." Sean said, opening and closing his hands. "It's like I hear everything more clearly. The ticking of the clock downstairs, the neighbor's snoring... and Scott, so this is how you felt that day."