Chapter 1 — The Doorbell
The rain had stopped an hour ago and the house still sounded like it was raining, water sliding off the gutter and hitting the porch rail in a slow, uneven beat. Stiles lay on top of his blankets with his shoes still on and listened to it.
He had counted the beats for a while. He had given up on that too.
His jeep keys were on the floor where he had dropped them. His jacket was over the desk chair with a tear in the elbow and a dark stain on the sleeve that he did not want to look at in better light. The lamp was off. The room was gray and the window was gray and the clock on the nightstand said 11:42 and then it said 11:43, and he watched it change.
Downstairs, the fridge hummed and clicked off.
He had been in the preserve until nine. Something had come through the trees near the old rail line and Scott had told everyone to spread out, and Stiles had done what he always did, which was go the direction nobody else was going. He had found the tracks. He had found the blood. He had not found the thing that made either, and when it came out of the dark and put him into a tree hard enough to snap the bark off it, he had felt his shoulder come out of the socket and felt it slide back in before he hit the ground.
He had laid in the wet leaves with his heart going and waited for the pain to mean something. It never did. It never had.
He had gotten up, dusted his hands on his jeans, and walked back to the jeep with his teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached, and that was the only part of him that still hurt by the time he got home.
Scott had called twice. Lydia had called once. Stiles had texted all of them the same three words, *made it home*, and then he had turned his phone face down on the nightstand and laid there with his shoes on.
He did not want to talk about what had happened in the preserve. He especially did not want to talk about the part where he should not have walked out of it.
The clock said 11:51.
The doorbell rang.
Stiles turned his head toward the door of his room and did not move otherwise. His dad was on shift until three. Scott did not use the doorbell. Nobody used the doorbell.
It rang again, twice, quick.
He got up. His shoulder popped when he rolled it and he ignored that, and he went down the stairs two at a time with his hand on the rail, and he checked the window beside the door first the way his dad had taught him when he was nine and the way he had actually started doing about a year ago.
There was a girl on the porch.
She had a duffel bag on one shoulder and her hair was wet at the ends and she was standing with her weight on one hip, and she was holding something against her chest, wrapped up in a blanket, and she had her chin tucked down over it like she was keeping the wind off it.
Stiles opened the door.
Hope Mikaelson looked up at him.
He had spent about four months telling himself he had made her up. Not the whole thing. The details. The way she said his name with the *s* a little soft. The chipped black polish on her thumbnail. The way she had laughed at him in that courtyard in New Orleans like she had not planned on laughing at anything that week.
She had the same thumbnail. It was chipped again, or still.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," Stiles said.
Neither of them said anything else for a second. Water came off the gutter and hit the rail.
"Can I come in?" Hope asked. "It's cold, and she doesn't like the cold."
Stiles's eyes went down to the blanket.
There was a face in it. Small, round, one fist up against her own mouth, asleep, and a thin bit of dark hair stuck flat to her forehead.
Stiles felt the doorframe under his hand and was aware that he was holding onto it.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Come in."
He stepped back and Hope came past him into the hall, and he shut the door and stood there with his hand still on the knob for longer than he needed to.
Hope stopped in the middle of the living room and looked around. The lamp by the couch. The mail on the table. The framed photo on the shelf of a woman with her arms around a kid in a red hoodie.
"Your house is nice," she said.
"It's my dad's house."
"It's still nice."
She sat down on the edge of the couch and shifted the blanket, moving her arm under it, careful, the way people are careful with something that has a temper. Stiles stayed standing. He wiped his palms on his jeans and then did not know what to do with his hands, so he crossed his arms, and then uncrossed them.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," Hope said.
"You're in Beacon Hills."
"I am."
"That's — " he pointed vaguely at the door — "that's very far from where you were."
"Thirty-one hours," Hope said. "I drove it in four days. She doesn't like the car either."
Stiles looked at the blanket again.
"Hope."
"I know."
"Whose is she?"
Hope looked up at him. She had her mother's steadiness in her face and none of it in her hands, and Stiles watched her fingers move on the edge of the blanket, folding it and unfolding it.
"Sit down," she said.
"I don't want to sit down."
"Stiles. Sit down."
He sat down. He sat on the coffee table, across from her, elbows on his knees, which was not sitting down in any way she had meant it.
"Her name is Mira," Hope said. "She's three months and eleven days old. She was born in New Orleans on the second, at nine in the morning, and she weighed six pounds and one ounce, and she screamed for four hours straight the first night and my aunt walked her up and down the courtyard until the sun came up." She stopped. She breathed. "And she's yours."
The fridge clicked on in the kitchen.
Stiles heard it. He heard the rail dripping outside. He heard his own blood in his ears, which was new, because nothing in his body had done anything interesting in a very long time.
"Say something," Hope said.
"I'm working on it."
"Take your time."
"I'm gonna need a lot of it."
He put his hands over his face and left them there. Then he dropped them.
"Three months," he said.
"Yes."
"You had a baby three months ago and you drove here."
"Yes."
"Why now?"
Hope's jaw tightened. "That's the question I thought you'd ask."
"It's the question I asked."
"I know." She looked down at Mira. "For a while I decided I wasn't going to find you. You told me things about your life that night. About your friends. About what happens here. I figured you already had more than you could carry, and I wasn't going to walk up to your door and hand you something else."
"So what changed?"
"She did," Hope said. "She started looking at me. That's all. She started looking at me like she knew me, and I sat there at four in the morning with her in my arms, and I thought, *she's going to ask me one day.* And I'd have to tell her that I knew exactly where he was and I never went." She shook her head. "I wasn't going to be the reason she never met you. That's not a thing I could have lived with."
Stiles did not say anything.
"And I wanted to see you," Hope said, quieter. "That part I'd like on the record."
Stiles laughed once, without much in it, and rubbed the back of his neck.
"Can I — " He stopped. Started again. "Is it okay if I look at her?"
Hope shifted her arm and turned so the blanket opened toward him.
Mira had one eye half open. She worked her mouth, made a small sound that was not quite a complaint, and settled again. Her fist was still up by her chin. Her fingers were unbelievably small. Stiles had seen a lot of impossible things in the last three years and not one of them had done to him what those fingers did.
"She's got your hairline," Hope said.
"She's got my — no she doesn't."
"She does. It goes up on one side. Look at it."
"That's a slander."
"It's a hairline."
Stiles reached out, stopped, and looked at Hope. Hope nodded.
He put one finger against Mira's palm, and Mira's hand closed around it without waking up.
Stiles sat very still.
"Okay," he said. His voice came out wrong and he cleared his throat. "Okay."
Hope watched him and did not say anything, and let him have it.
After a while he said, "Does your family know you're here?"
"My family knows everything I do about eleven minutes after I do it."
"That's a no."
"That's a *they'll find out*," Hope said. "My father is not a man who takes news well. He took this one about as well as anyone could have hoped, eventually, which is a story I'll tell you when you've slept." She looked at his jacket sleeve where it hung over the chair in the hall, at the stain on it, and then at him. "Which is another thing. You look like someone hit you with a car."
"Tree," Stiles said.
"Excuse me?"
"A tree. Something hit me *into* a tree. The tree was innocent."
"And you're fine."
"I'm fine."
"You're standing there with someone else's blood on your jacket at midnight telling me you're fine."
"That one's mine, actually."
Hope's face changed.
Stiles heard himself say it about half a second after it was already out, and he closed his eyes briefly.
"Okay," Hope said. "Show me."
"It's not — "
"Stiles."
He pushed his sleeve up.
There was dried blood from his elbow to his wrist, a lot of it, dark and flaking where it had dried in the creases. There was no cut. There was not a mark on the skin anywhere under it, not a scratch, not a bruise, nothing but the blood that had come out of an arm that had been opened to the bone four hours ago.
Hope looked at it for a long moment.
"That's not healing," she said. "I know what healing looks like. That's not that."
"No," Stiles said. "It's not."
"Then what is it?"
He pulled his sleeve back down.
"It's a long conversation," he said. "And you drove thirty-one hours, and she's asleep, and I've got a guest room with clean sheets in it because my dad panics if there isn't one." He stood up. "Stay. Please stay. Ask me in the morning and I'll tell you everything, I swear, all of it, the whole thing. I just — " he looked at the blanket, at the small fist, and something went through his chest that he did not have a name for — "I've had a night. And that's my kid. And I'd like about eight hours where those are the only two things I have to think about."
Hope stood up too, carefully, and stayed where she was for a second, close enough that he could see how tired she actually was under all of it.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay."
"Second floor?"
"Second floor. End of the hall. I'll get the bag."
She let him take the duffel off her shoulder, and she went up the stairs ahead of him with Mira against her chest, and Stiles stood at the bottom with the bag in his hand and watched them both go up.
Then he turned off the lamp and followed them, and for the first time in a very long time he was actually afraid of something that could happen to him.