Beacon ⌲ Stiles Stilinski [1] EDITING

eight

I unpeeled my orange with concentration as Lydia picked at her salad. Allison had pushed her lunch tray aside and had piled our end of the cafeteria table with old, dusty books from the library.

The other night, Dad, Mom, and Allison all trudged in the door together. Allison had been silent and stomped up to her room while Mom's forehead had been harshly creased; cleaning the dishes with force and causing loud clangs to be heard throughout the house. Apparently, Allison had been caught in the act of skipping all day, with Scott of course, and had been grounded. The last time Allison was grounded was when she flunked a math test in the fifth grade, so it was all a bit shocking and my sister was unsurprisingly annoyed.

Meanwhile, as I had been sat comfortably at home, drowning in my mortification, a cougar ran loose through the parking lot at school and Dad had to shoot and kill it in order to save all the innocent bystanders. So all in all, just your average parent-teacher conference night.

With all the drama going around with the animal attacks, I was doing my best to avoid Stiles. Everyone was gossiping about how since a mountain lion was dead, we were sure to see the end of the attacks, but I just couldn't shake the image from Lydia's cell phone out of my mind. Besides that, I had been permanently humiliated after acting like a complete spaz in front of Stiles, and I didn't want to face anymore questions from him that frankly, I didn't have the answers to.

Due to her Scott deprivation, my sister had dived head first into our history assignment; finding something interesting in our family's heritage. Because we had the same family history, our teacher was allowing us to complete the same project, but we had to include extra sources and word counts. 

"The what of who?" Lydia questioned, twirling her fork.

"The beast of Gevaudan. Listen," my twin sister leaned forward with a book in her hand. She told me she'd uncovered a supernatural legend associated with our family name. Kate had shown her last night while I was absorbed in my insomnia. "A quadruped wolf-like monster prowling the Auvergne and South Dordogne areas of France during the year 1764 to 1767. La Bete killed over a hundred people, becoming so infamous that the King Louie the 15th sent one of his best hunters to try and kill it."

"Boring," Lydia sighed.

"Even the church eventually declared the monster a messenger of Satan."

"Still boring."

"Cryptozoologists believe it may have been a subspecies of hoofed predator, possibly mesonychid."

"Slipping into a coma, bored."

"While others believe it was a powerful sorcerer who could shape-shift into a man-eating monster," Allison continued.

I cracked open my water bottle and took a sip before speaking up. "What does this have to do with our ancestors?"

"This part here," my sister dragged her finger along the page. "It is believed that la Bete was finally trapped and killed by a renowned hunter who claimed his wife and four children were the first to fall prey to the creature. His name was Argent."

Lydia tilted her chin up and squinted. "So your ancestors killed a big wolf, so what?"

"Not just a big wolf," Allison persisted. "Take a look at this picture."

With that, she turned around the novel she was reading to display a faded black and white illustration.

My face paled and I froze, suddenly losing all of my appetite. I darted my eyes up to watch Lydia's reaction. She didn't know about my nightmares, nor about the fact that Stiles and I had snooped on her phone while she was drugged out, so really she should've been the only one reacting like this; especially if she was connecting the dots that I was.