12. Plans

“Stiles.  Stiles, wake up.”  Stiles felt something wet on his face.

“Mama?”  He opened his eyes, blinking as his mother’s face appeared before him.  Her eyes were so like his own, concern clear in the amber depths.  Distantly, he could feel a throbbing pain, but all he could focus on was his mother’s expression, her hands gentle in his hair.  Her lips were moving, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying.

“Mama, I — I can’t —”

“Wake up!”  Stiles’ neck jarred, his cheek stinging with the slap, and when he opened his eyes again his mother was gone, Kate Argent’s grim expression staring him down.

“Where? —” Stiles started to say.  He tried to sluggishly move his limbs, hearing the clank of metal as his left arm and leg only gave an inch or two.  His shoulder was throbbing steadily now, in time with his head.  He looked down, blinking at the darkness a few times before he could perceive the manacles holding his feet to the chair legs, a matching cuff of metal securing his left wrist to the arm of the chair.  They looked like the kind of restraints Stiles had been forced to use on Scott, and Stiles wouldn’t be surprised if they were laced with wolfsbane as well.

Kate pulled sharply on his hair, tugging his head up again.  “Awake now?” she sneered.  “Finally.  Pick up the pen.  I need you to write something.”

“What?”  

The fingers in his hair let go.  His head dropped sharply before he stopped it, the pounding pain intensifying with the sudden movement.  He blinked again, his eyes focusing now on the blank paper, pen, and inkwell in front of him.  He realized his right hand was free, and he brought it up to brace against the edge of the table.

“Write.”  The command was so unexpected that Stiles would have thought he was hallucinating again, but Kate was already dipping the pen in ink and pressing it into his hand.

“Write to Derek.  Say that you have something vital to tell him and Peter, and he must come to Rosings immediately.”

Stiles’ numb fingers grasped the pen automatically.

“Why do you need me to write it?”

“He knows your hand.  The lovelorn idiot, he keeps a letter you wrote him in his breast pocket!”

Stiles met her eyes in shock.  “I —”  He had written to Derek, thanking him for the use of his carriage to take Melissa home after Scott was injured.  Just a few simple lines, a courtesy.  Derek had kept that modest communication — even treasured it?

“Money can buy me any information I seek, and Derek’s valet is as greedy as anyone.  I know for certain that Derek will know your scent, and your hand, and he will not countenance having you at Peter’s without him, the protective idiot.  Now write!”

Stiles swallowed again, his throat feeling scraped and dusty.  “You mean to kill them both,” he realized aloud.  “You can’t get to Derek in the City, and you want to draw him away.  Take your revenge on both of them at once.”

Kate smiled, a terrifying clash of teeth, her eyes wild.  “The lines of mountain ash are already laid, ready to be activated.  Rosings will burn just as Pemberley once did.”

“You did do it.  You killed Derek’s family.”

Kate began pacing, muttering almost to himself.  “A middle son would never amount to anything.  He had it all, and I gave it to him!  And how did he show his gratitude?  He cast me aside, on the advice of that bastard dog of an uncle.  Ten years I spent in exile, imprisoned in a hovel by my own brother when he found out what I had done —”

She hardly seemed to have remembered Stiles was there, and he felt his mind drift a little as a wave of dizziness washed over him, his stomach roiling with nausea.  Kate was ranting about Chris, and some escape — a soldier she had seduced and killed.  How his gun, horse, and purse were the only useful things about him.

Stiles tuned her out until her words were a babble, his head starting to droop again.  Kate was suddenly before him again, her hand pressing the pen back into his nerveless fingers.  

“Write!” she screeched.

Stiles hated her, and yet he pitied her.  This was her plan all along, the reason for his abduction?

“Never,” he said, and almost wished she were a werewolf so that she could hear the truth of his words.  “I’ll never write it.”

“You will!”  Kate’s shriek made him wince, the throbbing pain in his head kicking up a notch.  She reached out, digging her left thumb into the wound on Stiles’ shoulder, the right hand still holding the gun on him.  “Write it!” she screamed.

The pain jolted through Stiles, making his whole body arc against the restraints.  She kept the pressure up for endless moments, grinding into the open wound, and Stiles could do nothing but whimper and pant through it, trying to maintain consciousness.

Finally she eased up, stepping back and forcing the pen back into his hand with bloody fingers.  “Write!”

Stiles wrapped his fingers around the pen, trying to steady his grip, and set the pen to paper.  He leaned forward, as if to better see what he was writing, and Kate unconsciously leaned forward as well.  Stiles suddenly stabbed sideways, driving the pen deep into the wrist of Kate’s gunhand.  She screamed, her grip reflexively loosening.  Stiles grabbed for the pistol, but Kate managed to tighten her grip.  She crashed her left elbow into Stiles’ face.  He heard something in his nose crunch, his throat filling with salty blood as his face exploded with pain.  He saw the pistol arcing toward his head, and then darkness swallowed him up again.

Stiles seemed to slip in and out of consciousness.  His thoughts were sludgy, muddled.  Visions seemed to come to him, but whether they were dreams or hallucinations he hardly knew.  He saw his father, deep in drink, every sip a silent accusation blaming Stiles for his mother’s death.  His mother’s face appeared again, this time gaunt with illness, but her fingers were still soft and gentle in Stiles’ hair.  Once he thought Scott was there, six or seven years old again, showing him a favored toy, and he tried to smile back at him even though his face ached.  

Kate continued to rail at him, but her words were difficult to understand, slithering away like silver fish as Stiles tried to grasp their meaning.  At times he could hear his own voice, the words oddly slurred, but he didn’t know what he was saying.  On one occasion he found the pen in his hand again, and his heart suddenly thumped an uneven beat wondering if he had done as Kate wished and not known it.  When he focused in on the words he had put to paper, however, they simply read, “Never never never never never never…”

At one point he thought he heard a roar, so loud it seemed that the walls of the cottage would shake down around him.  Scott, he thought wildly, but he had never heard Scott sound like that.  Then there were other sounds — thuds and bangs, the crack of bone and a repulsive wet gurgle.  He thought he saw Derek’s face, the alpha-red eyes fading to beautiful multi colored irises, wet with tears.

“No,” he heard himself slur.  “Y’re not here.  I d’int write it.”  He seemed to blink for a long time, and when he opened his eyes again it was Scott’s face instead, and then his father’s.

“Dad,” Stiles said.  “‘M s’rry, Dad.”  He tried to remember what he was sorry for.  He thought it was dying, but that didn’t make sense, did it?  While he was still trying to remember, consciousness slipped away from him once more.