# **The Dark One of Beacon Hills**
## **Chapter Four: The Choice**
---
The blood scent hanging over the preserve was thick enough to taste.
Stiles didn't bother with the Jeep. He simply stepped through the shadows of his bedroom and coalesced at the edge of the woods. His senses, heightened by the ancient power of the Dark One, immediately filtered through the noise of the night.
He found Malia Tate crumpled in a ravine. Her abdomen was a ruin of jagged gashes, and the copper tang of her coyote blood was mixed with something else—the scent of gunpowder and desert sage.
"Mom..." she wheezed. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. "She's... she's faster..."
Stiles went cold. He knew the lore the pack had gathered. Malia's biological mother was the Desert Wolf, an assassin who had been hunting her own daughter to reclaim the power she'd lost during childbirth.
"Not today," Stiles whispered.
He knelt, biting his own wrist. He didn't just let his blood drip into her mouth; he used his magic to force the healing. He watched as the torn muscle knitted back together, the skin sealing over until there was nothing left but shredded denim and dried blood.
He left her there, sleeping and safe, and turned his face toward the scent of desert sage.
---
He found the Desert Wolf in an abandoned cannery on the edge of the county line. She was cleaning a high-caliber pistol, her movements clinical and cold. She didn't even look up when Stiles appeared in the center of the room.
"You're not a wolf," she said, her voice like grinding stones. "You don't smell like anything I've ever hunted."
"That's because I'm the thing that hunts you," Stiles said.
The Desert Wolf lunged, her speed supernatural, her guns firing. Stiles didn't move. The bullets hit an invisible barrier six inches from his chest and crumpled, falling to the floor like dead insects.
He raised a hand. The air in the cannery turned to ice.
"You touched my pack," Stiles said, his voice dropping into that double-layered resonance that signaled the Dark One's full presence. "You tried to kill a girl because you were too weak to hold onto your own power."
"It's my birthright!" she snarled, shifting into her coyote form, her eyes glowing a predatory blue.
Stiles didn't use the dagger. He didn't need it. He simply reached out with his will. The Desert Wolf was slammed backward into a stack of rusting crates, held there by a force that felt like the weight of a mountain.
"I am the Dark One," Stiles whispered, appearing inches from her face. "I have the memories of a thousand killers, Corinne. I know how to unmake you. I know how to pull the life from your body and use it to light a candle."
He let his eyes go pitch black. The shadows in the room began to crawl up her legs, binding her.
"Wait!" she gasped, the bravado finally breaking. "I have information! The people who funded the dead pool... the ones coming next... I know names! I know the hierarchy!"
Stiles paused. He could feel the darkness inside him screaming to just crush her. To feel her ribs snap. To taste the chaos of her end. But he thought of Scott. He thought of Malia. He thought of the war that was coming.
"Talk," Stiles commanded. "And if you lie, I will make your eternity very, very loud."
For the next hour, he stripped her of every secret she held. He learned of the Dread Doctors, of the international consortiums of hunters, of the vulnerabilities of the McCall pack that she had intended to exploit.
When she was finished, Stiles didn't kill her. He did something worse for a hunter. He cast a binding spell so deep it settled into her marrow.
"You are banished," he said. "If you ever step foot within a hundred miles of Beacon Hills, or if you ever think a violent thought toward Malia Tate again, the binding will trigger. You will turn to ash before you can even draw a breath. Do you understand?"
Corinne nodded, trembling.
"Go," Stiles said.
With a wave of his hand, he teleported her to the middle of the Mojave Desert, hundreds of miles away.
---
He didn't go home. He went to the one place that still felt like a tether to the world of the living.
Allison was at her desk, the lamp casting long shadows across her room. She didn't startle when he appeared. She simply put down her pen and looked at him. She saw the blood on his shirt—Malia's blood. She saw the cold, distant look in his eyes that usually meant he had done something monstrous.
"Malia's mother came," Stiles said, his voice cracking.
"Is Malia—"
"She's fine. I healed her. The Desert Wolf is gone. Permanently."
He sat on the edge of her bed, his head in his hands. The power was humming under his skin, a restless, oily tide that wanted more. It wanted to feed. It wanted to dominate.
"Allison," he said, looking up at her. "I can't do this anymore."
She frowned, stepping toward him. "Do what?"
"This." He gestured between them. "The compulsion. The silence. The forced belonging. I thought I was doing it to keep you safe, to keep the secret safe. But I'm just becoming everything I'm afraid of."
He stood up, his eyes intense.
"I'm removing it. All of it. Right now."
Allison froze. "Stiles, what are you saying?"
"I'm saying I'm giving you your head back. I'm removing the compulsion to keep my secret. I'm removing the compulsion that makes you not afraid of me. You can walk out of this room right now. You can go to your father. You can go to Scott. You can tell him everything I've done—the people I've fed on, the way I've controlled you, the monster I've become."
He took a step closer, his heart—the one that didn't need to beat but did for her—pounding in his chest.
"And if you do... I'll watch him. I'll watch Scott's face when he realizes his best friend is the thing he hunts. And then I'll run. I'll leave the pack. I'll leave the town. I will run so far and so fast that even with all your hunter connections, you will never see a shadow of me again. I'll leave you all alone. You'll be safe from me forever."
Allison's breath hitched. She looked at the door, then back at him. She could feel the invisible weight on her mind—the mental block he'd placed there weeks ago—beginning to shimmer and dissolve.
"But," Stiles whispered, his voice trembling with a raw, desperate hope. "But if you stay with me... if you choose to be here, knowing everything... then I think I can resist the darkness. You're the only thing that makes me feel human, Allison. You're the only reason I don't just let the Dark One take over and burn this town to the ground."
He reached out, his hand hovering near her face but not touching.
"It's your choice. For the first time, it's really your choice. Tell them and I disappear. Stay, and help me stay human."
With a sharp intake of breath, Stiles closed his eyes and pushed. He felt the threads of his own magic snap. The compulsion shattered.
For Allison, it was like a fog suddenly lifted. The subtle "numbness" she hadn't even realized was there vanished. She felt the full weight of the trauma of the last few weeks—the fear, the violation, the confusion. It all hit her at once.
She looked at Stiles. He looked smaller. He looked like the boy she'd known in the hallways of BHHS, just a kid in a blood-stained hoodie, waiting for a sentence he felt he deserved.
She looked at the door. Her father was downstairs. Her weapons were in the closet. One word, and the hunt would begin.
She looked back at Stiles.
"You would really leave?" she asked. "You'd give up your pack? Your dad? Everything?"
"If it's what you want," he said, tears finally spilling over. "I love you enough to lose you, Allison. I just... I don't want to lose *myself*."
The silence in the room was deafening. Seconds ticked by like hours. Stiles held his breath, ready to vanish the moment she reached for her phone or moved toward the door.
Allison took a step forward. Then another.
She didn't go for the door. She reached out and took his hand. Her grip was firm—a hunter's grip, but warm.
"You're a monster, Stiles," she said, her voice shaking but certain. "What you did to me... it was unforgivable. I should hate you. Part of me probably still does."
Stiles flinched, nodding.
"But," she continued, "I saw you save Malia. I saw you stop the Oni. And I see you now, giving me the power to destroy you when you didn't have to."
She stepped into his space, forcing him to look her in the eyes.
"If I stay... if I help you stay human... you don't get to hide things from me anymore. No more compulsion. No more 'protecting me' by taking away my choices. We do this as equals, or we don't do it at all."
Stiles let out a sob of pure, unadulterated relief. He slumped forward, burying his face in her shoulder. "I promise. I promise, Allison."
"Then stay," she whispered, her arms slowly coming up to wrap around him. "Stay here. Stay human. I'm not going to tell Scott. Not yet. But we're going to find a way to make this right."
Stiles clung to her, the darkness inside him receding into the background, quelled by the one thing the Dark One had never truly possessed in all its thousands of years:
A choice, freely made, to be loved.
"I love you," he murmured into her hair.
"I know," she replied, her eyes looking toward the window at the dark woods outside. "Now let's figure out how to keep you from becoming the thing we hunt."
In the distance, the Desert Wolf was running, Malia was dreaming, and the Dread Doctors were beginning their work. But in a small room in Beacon Hills, the Dark One had found his tether. And for the first time, the tether was made of steel.
---
**End of Chapter Four**