# Chapter 1: Omega
---
**THE THEATER**
The lights came up slowly, the way they do in a real theater, and nobody in the room knew how they had gotten there.
Klaus Mikaelson was on his feet before the glow had finished spreading across the ceiling. Hayley was already halfway down the aisle, her eyes going row by row across velvet seats she had never seen before.
"Where is she?"
Nobody answered, because nobody knew.
Elijah straightened his cuffs, which meant he was more rattled than he looked. Rebekah had a hand on Freya's arm. Kol was checking the exits, then checking them again. Marcel was doing the same thing from the other side of the room without either of them coordinating it.
Farther down, the Mystic Falls contingent was working through the same math. Elena and Stefan. Damon, already scowling. Caroline with Lizzie and Josie pressed on either side of her. Bonnie. Alaric, who looked like a man who had been in a room like this before and hadn't enjoyed it. MG, Kaleb, and Landon, who had chosen a seat and then gotten right back up.
"The last thing I remember," Josie said carefully, "is Malivore. She jumped."
"She jumped," Lizzie repeated, and her voice did something small and awful on the second word. "Into the pit. She—and we *forgot* her. We all forgot her. Why do we remember now?"
The screen behind the stage flickered on.
There were no words. No voice. No instructions. Just a black rectangle that became, slowly, an image: the underside of a night sky through pine branches, and a girl lying in the dirt.
"Hope," Hayley breathed, and sat down like her knees had made the decision for her.
---
**BEACON HILLS PRESERVE — NIGHT**
She hit the ground hard.
That was the first thing Hope Mikaelson knew: pain, and then cold, and then the smell of pine needles and wet earth. She rolled onto her back and stared up. Trees. Stars. Air that didn't taste like tar.
She was out.
*Okay. Okay. You're out. You're alive. Get up.*
The theater heard it. Every one of them heard it—her voice, shaky and stubborn, inside their heads like she was whispering in each ear.
"We can hear her," Bonnie said quietly. "We can hear what she's thinking."
Hope pushed herself up. Her hands were scraped raw. Her jacket was torn at the shoulder. Everything hurt in the dull, full-body way that meant she had fallen from somewhere high.
*Where am I? This isn't Georgia. This isn't Virginia. This doesn't—*
She reached for the one thing that always answered. Magic. It came, but it came *wrong*, like a radio catching a station that was almost the right one. The air here was different. Thinner in one way, thicker in another. Something old was under the ground, humming.
*Something's off. Everything's off. Find people. Find a road.*
She started walking.
---
**THE THEATER**
"She's hurt," Freya said.
"She's *walking*," Klaus said, and it came out almost proud and almost furious at once. "She's on her feet. That's my girl."
"Where is she?" Kol asked. "That's not any preserve I know."
"She said it herself," Elijah murmured, eyes on the screen. "Nothing there is right. Look at how she's reaching for her magic. It isn't gone. It's… unfamiliar to her."
Landon hadn't said anything. He was gripping the armrest hard enough that MG glanced over.
---
**BEACON HILLS SHERIFF'S STATION — LATE NIGHT**
The deputy at the front desk looked up when the door opened and immediately stood.
The girl in the doorway was maybe seventeen. Dirt on her jeans. Scraped palms. A tear in her jacket and a look in her eyes that the deputy would later describe to the sheriff as "like she'd been through something and hadn't decided yet whether to be scared about it."
"Hi," Hope said. "I—I think I'm lost."
Sheriff Noah Stilinski came out of his office ten minutes later with a cup of coffee he didn't want and a file he hadn't opened. Two days of Lydia Martin in the hospital, his son sleeping in a plastic chair, and the county still asking questions about the Hale fire he couldn't answer. He was tired.
Then he saw the kid in the chair by his deputy's desk with a foil blanket around her shoulders, and the tired went somewhere else.
"Hey," he said, pulling up a chair in front of her. Not behind a desk. In front of her, low, the way you sit with somebody who's been hurt. "I'm Sheriff Stilinski. What's your name?"
"Hope." A beat. "Hope Marshall."
*Don't say Mikaelson. You don't know who's here. You don't know what's here.*
"Okay, Hope. You want to tell me what happened?"
She had had forty minutes of walking to build the lie. It was a good one, because it was mostly true.
"I don't really remember. I was—there was an accident. I woke up in the woods. I don't know how I got here." Her voice cracked a little on the last word and she hated it and let it happen, because it worked. "I don't know where *here* is."
"Beacon Hills. California." He watched her face. "That mean anything to you?"
It didn't. That was the part that scared her.
"Is there somebody I can call for you? Parents?"
*Dad. Mom. Aunt Freya. Anybody.*
"My parents are dead," she said. And that one wasn't a lie at all.
---
**THE THEATER**
Hayley made a sound.
Klaus didn't. He had gone very still, which everyone in the family knew was worse.
"She's saying it like a fact," Rebekah said softly. "Like it's a thing she's already learned how to say."
"Because it is," Hayley said. "We were gone, Klaus. She's been saying it for years."
Elena reached across the aisle without looking and put her hand on Caroline's shoulder, because Caroline was watching Hope in that chair and thinking about Lizzie and Josie and it was written all over her.
"Marshall," Damon said, breaking it. "Smart. Nobody's going to google that."
"She's hiding who she is," Stefan said. "She doesn't know if that world knows the name."
"That sheriff's a decent man," Alaric said, quiet. He'd been watching Stilinski the whole time. "Look how he's sitting. He's not interrogating her. He's just… making sure she knows she's safe."
---
**BEACON HILLS SHERIFF'S STATION — CONTINUOUS**
The sheriff was on the phone with Child Protective Services and getting nowhere at one in the morning when the door banged open.
"Dad—Dad, okay, don't get mad, Lydia's *gone*, the shower was running and she just—she's gone, there's a window, Melissa's losing her mind, and I *know* you said go home but I was already there so technically—"
Stiles Stilinski came around the corner talking with his hands, hoodie half-zipped, hair sticking up on one side from a hospital chair, and stopped.
Just stopped.
Mid-sentence, mid-step, mid-thought.
Because there was a girl in the chair by Parrish's desk with a foil blanket around her shoulders, and she had looked up when he came in, and something inside Stiles that had been asleep for seventeen years opened its eyes.
---
**THE THEATER**
Every single person in the theater heard it.
It wasn't a word. It was a *sound*—like a bell struck once in a cathedral, like a chord resolving. And then under it, a voice that none of them had heard before, quiet and clear and absolutely certain:
*Oh.*
*Oh no.*
*It's her.*
Kaleb sat forward. "Wait. Wait. Is that—we can hear *him*?"
*Mate. Mate. That's—no. No, that's not—that doesn't happen to me, that's not supposed to happen to me, I made sure, I made SURE—*
"Mate?" Lizzie said sharply. "Did he just—"
"Shh," said four Mikaelsons at once.
---
**BEACON HILLS SHERIFF'S STATION — CONTINUOUS**
To anyone watching, Stiles Stilinski froze for about a second and a half, which for Stiles was practically a coma.
Then he blinked, and he was Stiles again.
"—technically not breaking the rule. Hi." That last part was to the girl. His voice went a little high. He cleared his throat. "Hi. Sorry. Didn't know you had—who's—Dad, who's this?"
"Stiles." His father pinched the bridge of his nose. "Lydia's *gone*?"
"Gone. Poof. Naked, probably, which is a whole separate issue. Scott's on his way—hi, again, sorry, I'm Stiles, I'm not usually—I mean I *am* usually, this is pretty on-brand, honestly—"
"Hope," she said.
And she was looking at him.
Hope Mikaelson had spent her entire life around predators. She had been raised by them. She knew what it looked like when something dangerous walked into a room wearing a human face. And the boy in the doorway with the hoodie and the flailing hands and the hair sticking up was absolutely, one hundred percent not that.
Except.
*Except something in the room just changed and I don't know what.*
*He's just a kid. He's the sheriff's kid. He's rambling about a naked girl.*
*So why do I feel like the air got heavier?*
---
**THE THEATER**
"She felt it," Freya said, sitting up. "She felt *something*."
"He's hiding it," Elijah said. He was watching Stiles the way he watched people across a negotiating table. "Look at him. That first second, he was somewhere else entirely. And then he simply… put the mask back on. That is a practiced thing."
"He's a *teenager* in a *hoodie*," Damon said. "He said 'poof.'"
"And in his head he said *mate*," Kol countered, "and he said *I made sure*. Made sure of what, exactly? What does a boy who says 'poof' *make sure* of?"
Klaus hadn't spoken. His jaw was tight. His eyes had not left Stiles Stilinski since the moment he came around that corner.
"Klaus," Hayley said.
"I heard him," Klaus said quietly. "I heard exactly what he said."
---
**BEACON HILLS SHERIFF'S STATION — CONTINUOUS**
"Okay," the sheriff said. "Okay. Stiles, you go with Scott, you find Lydia, you call me the *second* you find anything. Hope, I'm going to find you somewhere to sleep tonight and we'll figure the rest out in the morning. Deputy—"
"She can stay with us."
Both of them looked at him.
Stiles Stilinski, who had never volunteered his house for anything in his life, shrugged like his shoulders weren't sure what they were doing.
"I mean—it's one in the morning, CPS isn't gonna pick up, the motel on Route 5 is a crime scene at least twice a year, and we have a couch. A good couch. It's a *very* good couch. And you're gonna be up all night with Lydia anyway, and I'm gonna be up all night with Lydia anyway, so she'd basically be alone in a house with a locked door and a really enthusiastic alarm system that I installed myself."
His father stared at him.
*Don't argue with me, Dad. Please. Just this once, don't argue.*
*I can't let her out of my sight. I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds. But I can't.*
"Fine," the sheriff said slowly. "*Fine.* Hope, that okay with you?"
Hope looked at the sheriff, who was clearly a good man. Then at his son, who was clearly a mess.
*Better than a motel. And if this town has something in the ground, I'd rather be near a cop.*
"Okay," she said.
---
**THE THEATER**
"Absolutely not," Klaus said.
"She's *fine*, Nik—"
"She is going home with a *strange boy* who *heard a bell* when he looked at her—"
"He's protecting her," Hayley said, and her voice came out strange enough that Klaus turned. She was watching Stiles on the screen, and she'd gone a little pale. "Klaus. Listen to him. *I can't let her out of my sight.* You don't hear that? That's not a boy with a crush. That's—" She stopped.
"That's what you sounded like," Elijah said gently, "when she was born."
The theater went very quiet.
*He will protect her no matter the price.* MG hadn't said it aloud. But he was thinking it, and Kaleb, next to him, nodded once.
---
**BEACON HILLS PRESERVE — NIGHT**
Scott McCall could smell Lydia in the woods.
He held the hospital gown to his face, and the theater watched a boy with kind eyes and an awkward jaw go still and *listen* with senses that had nothing to do with hearing.
"This way."
Stiles was behind him. Allison Argent, who had climbed out her window against orders, was behind Stiles.
And Stiles kept looking at his phone.
"Dude." Scott didn't turn around. "You've checked that thing four times."
"I'm checking on the girl."
"What girl?"
"The—there's a girl. At my house. Long story. Dad found her. Or she found Dad. She fell out of the sky, kind of, not literally, I don't think literally, and she's sleeping on our couch and I want to make sure the house hasn't burned down."
Scott finally turned. "There's a girl on your *couch*."
"Focus, Scott. Lydia. Naked. Woods."
*I set three wards on the house before I left. Three. I haven't set a ward in four years. I told myself I wasn't going to do that anymore and I did three of them in ninety seconds without even thinking about it, and she was asleep and didn't see, but Dad's going to see the salt line at the back door and I don't have an explanation for the salt line at the back door.*
*What is wrong with me.*
*You know what's wrong with you. Say it.*
*No.*
---
**THE THEATER**
"Wards," Bonnie said instantly. "He said wards. He's a witch."
"He said *I told myself I wasn't going to do that anymore,*" Freya said slowly. "That's not a witch who's learning. That's a witch who *quit*."
"Or something that isn't a witch at all," Stefan said, "using a word we'd understand."
Klaus leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Salt line. Wards. Four years since he used them. He is *hiding*, and he is *good* at it, and the moment my daughter fell into his life he broke his own rules." A beat. "I want to know what he is."
"You want to know if he's *dangerous*," Rebekah said.
"I know he's dangerous, sister. Nothing hides that well unless it needs to." He sat back. "I want to know what he's dangerous *to*."
---
**BEACON HILLS PRESERVE — CONTINUOUS**
The trap took Scott off his feet and hung him by one ankle from a tree.
Allison hit the ground and rolled. Stiles went flat behind a log. Lights swept the trees, and men in dark jackets came through the brush with rifles, and Chris Argent stepped into the clearing with his hands in his pockets like it was a Sunday walk.
"Scott."
"Mr. Argent."
The theater watched Allison's father and Allison's boyfriend have a very polite, very terrifying conversation while Scott hung upside down.
Stiles, behind the log, was thinking very loudly.
*Don't. Don't do it. Argent's a hunter. His whole family are hunters. You do one thing, you so much as flick a finger, and they know. Everybody knows. And then it's not Lydia they're hunting in these woods, it's you, and then it's Dad, and then—*
*Scott's fine. Scott heals. Argent won't shoot his daughter's boyfriend in front of his daughter.*
*Just. Be. Human.*
Chris Argent cut Scott down, said something about a curfew, and walked away. Allison went with him, one look back over her shoulder.
Stiles stood up, brushed himself off, and did not touch a single thing.
"You good?"
"I'm good," Scott said. "Where's Lydia?"
"Still naked. Still missing."
---
**THE THEATER**
"He almost did it," Josie said. "Whatever it is. He almost did it for his friend and he *stopped*."
"He stops for his friend," Landon said quietly. It was the first thing he'd said since the screen turned on. Everybody looked at him. He didn't look away from the screen. "He didn't stop for Hope. He set the wards. He's not going to stop for Hope."
Nobody had a reply to that.
---
**STILINSKI HOUSE — DAWN**
Hope woke up on the very good couch with sunlight in her eyes and somebody moving in the kitchen.
She was on her feet with her hand out before she was fully awake. Old habit. Then she saw who it was and dropped her arm.
Stiles, still in the same hoodie, looked like he hadn't slept. He had a mug in each hand and froze when she stood, and something crossed his face that was gone too fast for her to name.
"Coffee," he said. "I don't know how you take it. I put nothing in it because nothing seemed like the safest possible bet. There's milk. There's sugar. There's a thing of hazelnut creamer my dad thinks I don't know about."
She took the mug.
"Did you find her? Your friend?"
"Not yet." He sat down on the arm of the chair across from her, then thought better of it and sat in the chair. "Scott's still out looking. Dad's—Dad's coming home to shower and then going back to the station. He said he's gonna figure out school for you. If you want school. You don't have to want school. School's negotiable. Everything's negotiable."
*Stop talking. Stop talking. She's going to think you're insane.*
*She's got her back to the wall and her feet apart. Who taught her to stand like that? Who taught a seventeen-year-old girl to wake up ready to fight?*
*Somebody hurt her.*
*Somebody's going to answer for that eventually.*
Hope watched him over the rim of the mug.
*He's nervous. He's rambling. He didn't sleep. He's the sheriff's son, and he offered his couch to a stranger, and he made coffee.*
*And there's a salt line at the back door. I saw it when I got up to use the bathroom.*
*Salt. In a sheriff's house.*
*Who ARE you, Stiles?*
"School's fine," she said. "I need to figure out how long I'm here."
"Right. Right, yeah, of course. Until your—until somebody comes for you."
"Nobody's coming for me," Hope said, and drank her coffee.
*Not because they don't want to. Because they don't remember I exist.*
---
**THE THEATER**
Hayley had both hands over her mouth.
Klaus had stood up and walked to the end of the row and was standing there with his back to the room, one hand braced against the wall.
"We remember now," Freya said, to nobody, to everybody. "Whatever this place is—we remember her *now*."
"She doesn't know that," Josie whispered.
On the screen, the boy in the hoodie was watching Hope drink her coffee, and his thoughts were quiet for the first time since he'd walked into that station. Only one line came through.
*Then I'll be the one who's here.*
---
**BEACON HILLS HIGH SCHOOL — MORNING**
Beacon Hills High School was exactly like every high school Hope had never gone to.
She'd been at the Salvatore School since she was a kid. Uniforms, wards, kids who could set the cafeteria on fire. This was lockers and fluorescent lights and a boy named Jackson Whittemore staring at himself in a bathroom mirror while something dark ran out of his nose.
Hope didn't see that. Stiles did, walking past, and kept walking, and the theater heard him file it away: *Jackson. Black blood. That's not right. Later.*
"Okay," Stiles said, back beside her in the hall. "Front office is there. Sheriff called ahead so it should be fast. Chemistry's the one to be scared of; Harris hates me personally and will probably hate you by association, sorry. Lunch is at—"
"Stiles."
He stopped.
"You don't have to babysit me."
"I'm not babysitting. I'm—" He looked for a word. "Orienting."
"You've orientated. I'm oriented."
"That's not—okay, yes, fine, I'll leave you alone." He didn't move. "I'm gonna be in the library at lunch. Second floor. If you want. Or don't. No pressure. Zero pressure. Negative pressure. Like a vacuum, in a way."
She almost smiled. It surprised both of them.
"Go find your friend," she said.
---
**BEACON HILLS HOSPITAL — AFTERNOON**
Melissa McCall was on her fourth cup of coffee and not enjoying any of them when the sheriff came in with the news that a body had been dug up in the cemetery, and part of it eaten.
The theater watched the town's adults do their version of the night before: calm voices, tight faces, questions they couldn't answer.
They watched a boy named Isaac Lahey get yelled at by his father in a kitchen, and go quiet in a way that made Caroline's hands curl into fists.
They watched Derek Hale find Isaac at the cemetery and offer him something.
They watched Jackson Whittemore corner Derek and demand the bite.
They watched a funeral, and cameras, and an old man with a kind face step out of a car, and Allison's grandfather Gerard shake hands with her father while the sheriff arrested Scott and Stiles for spying from behind a headstone.
"Wait, that's—the old man?" Kaleb said. "Everybody's scared of the *old man*?"
"Yes," said Klaus, Elijah, and Alaric at once, for entirely different reasons.
---
**BEACON HILLS PRESERVE — NIGHT**
Stiles had left his Jeep at the edge of the preserve.
Hope was in the passenger seat.
She wasn't supposed to be. He'd made that very clear, twice, and she'd gotten in anyway with the look of somebody who had been told *stay here* by better men than him, and he'd given up because giving up was easier than explaining why he was terrified.
*Terrified. That's the word. I'm not scared of the omega, I'm not scared of the Argents, I'm scared of her being fifty feet from the Argents and me not being able to do anything about it without—*
*Without.*
*Without what, Stiles? Say it. Without being what you are?*
Scott was somewhere ahead in the trees with Derek. Something else was in the trees with them—the thing that had eaten the body. An omega. A lone wolf with nobody.
"Stay in the car," Stiles said.
"You've said that."
"I'm gonna keep saying it."
"Stiles." She turned in the seat to look at him. "Whatever's out there. I can handle it."
*You don't know what's out there.*
*Yes, I do. It's a werewolf. I can smell it. I've smelled it since we parked. I'm a tribrid, you idiot boy, I've been fighting things like that since before I could drive—*
*But I can't tell you that. Because I don't know what you are either. And that salt line is still in my head.*
"I believe you," he said.
He did. That was the part that scared him.
And then the screaming started.
---
**BEACON HILLS PRESERVE — CONTINUOUS**
The theater watched Gerard Argent cut a werewolf in half.
Not fast. Not clean. A broadsword and an old man's steady arms while the omega hung from a tree, and Chris Argent said *we have a code* and his father said *not anymore*.
*We hunt those who hunt us.*
Scott and Derek watched from the trees. They heard it. Derek's face, in the dark, went somewhere cold.
Stiles was at the tree line.
Hope was, against every one of his instructions, beside him.
And when the sword came down, she flinched. Not from the violence; she'd seen worse. She flinched because for one half-second, the air around Stiles Stilinski turned to *pressure*, the way it does before lightning, and every hair on her arms stood up.
She looked at him.
His face was completely normal. Pale, tight, human.
His hand was closed in a fist at his side, and the dirt under his boots had gone black and *frozen*, a ring of frost six inches wide, in California, in the middle of the night, with nobody's breath fogging.
*Stop. STOP. Stop it right now. They'll see. They'll SEE.*
*He killed it. He just killed it. Halved it. And she's twenty feet from him. Twenty feet. If he turns around—*
*He's not going to turn around. Breathe. Bring it in. Bring it back down. You've done this a thousand times.*
*But you've never done it with her standing next to you.*
The frost withdrew into the dirt like it had never been there.
Stiles unclenched his hand.
"Okay," he said, very quietly. "Car. Now. Please."
Hope went. Not because he'd said it.
Because she'd felt it.
---
**THE THEATER**
Nobody moved.
On the screen, the Jeep's headlights came on and swept the trees and disappeared down the road.
"Frost," Bonnie said finally. "That was frost. On the ground. From him."
"That wasn't witchcraft," Freya said. Her voice was very careful. "I know what witchcraft feels like when it leaks. That was… older. That was something *reacting*."
"To *Gerard*," Stefan said. "Not to the wolf dying. To the man with the sword standing that close to her."
Klaus had come back down the row at some point. He was standing at the end of it with his arms crossed, and for once in his very long life, he looked less like he wanted to kill something and more like he was doing arithmetic.
"He held it back," he said. "Look at what came off him in half a second, and he *held it back*. Because she was watching. Because those hunters were watching. He'd rather be thought a coward than let a single person know."
"You sound almost impressed," Rebekah said.
"I am *concerned*," Klaus said. "And I am impressed. The two are not exclusive." He looked at the black screen. "But she felt it. Did you see her face? She *felt* him."
"So what happens," Lizzie said, "when he stops holding it back?"
The screen flickered.
Nobody answered.
---
**STILINSKI HOUSE — LATE**
Hope lay on the very good couch and stared at the ceiling.
Down the hall, a door was cracked. She could hear Stiles not sleeping. Breathing too even to be real.
*He knows I know something. He's waiting for me to ask.*
*I'm not going to ask. Not yet.*
*Because whatever he is, he stood between me and that sword without taking a single step, and I don't think he even noticed he'd done it.*
In his room, Stiles lay on his back with one arm over his eyes.
*She saw the frost. Maybe. Probably. She's smart. She's smarter than she's letting on and she moves like a soldier and she's got secrets bigger than mine, I'd bet the Jeep on it.*
*Doesn't matter.*
*Doesn't matter if she never feels this. Doesn't matter if she gets on a bus tomorrow and never comes back. Doesn't matter if she looks at me and sees exactly what everybody else sees, a skinny kid with a big mouth and a badge-shaped chip on his shoulder.*
*She's mine to protect. Not mine. Mine to PROTECT. That's the part I get. That's the only part I'm asking for.*
*Whatever it costs.*
*Whatever I have to become.*
He turned over.
Down the hall, Hope Mikaelson heard him roll onto his side and closed her eyes, and for the first time since Malivore spat her out onto pine needles in a town she'd never heard of, she slept.
---
**THE THEATER**
The screen went dark.
The lights came up, low.
Hayley Marshall had tears on her face and didn't wipe them. Klaus sat down beside her, finally, and put a hand on her knee, and didn't say anything, which was the most restrained he had been in a thousand years.
"He'll do it," Landon said, to the black screen. It came out flat, like he'd already accepted something the rest of them hadn't gotten to yet. "Whatever it is. He'll do it for her."
"Yes," Elijah agreed quietly. "I rather think he will."
Across the room, Damon Salvatore stretched his legs out and folded his arms and said, to nobody in particular:
"Okay. I'm in. What's next?"
---
*End of Chapter 1.*