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Stiles dove behind the overturned table just as the lightning bolt hit the wall beside him. He wished that he could say that the high pitched scream that followed came from Amber crouched beside him but he couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.
“What the fuck!” she screamed. “It can shoot lightning. Why did you not tell me that it could fucking shoot fucking lightning?”
“I was reliably informed that possessions didn’t happen, so this is all kind of new to me!”
In truth he’d been told that ghosts didn’t exist, he’d just figured that demons had come under the same umbrella. He was wrong. Dead wrong.
A splatter of green goo sprayed across the wall of his room. The wallpaper began to blister and melt, falling off in great chunks. Well there went the security deposit. Stiles had thought college would be a break from all this crap. If anything, it had gotten worse.
“I don’t even know which end that came out of,” said a terrified voice on the other side of the room.
Amber looked across at him, trusting him. When they’d met as freshmen she’d just been a standard Wiccan, all about communing with Mother Earth and observing the pagan rituals. She’d never wanted to be a witch, let alone believed that any of this stuff was real. Now it was two years later and once again her and her coven had been roped into the latest supernatural emergency. She’d handled it a lot better than Stiles had to be honest.
His fingers clenched around the crucifix in his hands, taking a deep breath before standing and holding the wood out before him at the young girl floating three feet above his bed.
“Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica...”
He’d gotten quite good at memorising Latin by now. He continued to chant, trying to force what power he had into the wood in his hand, will it to work like he had four years ago armed with nothing but a bag of mountain ash to keep a deadly kanima confined but he could tell it wasn’t working. The little girl turned her head towards him, eyes bleached white, face a snarl. Blood was beginning to soak through her Minnie Mouse pyjamas. He managed to duck down behind the table just in time as another blast of energy tore across the wall.
“It’s not working!” said Stiles.
Amber scrambled through the pages of the book on her lap.
“It should be working! You need to believe that it will work. You need to believe.”
“I am but it’s hard to believe in something when it obviously isn’t working!”
Something solid slammed into the other side of the table and he could hear one of the others scream out their own incantation. He looked around the corner to see Nathan holding out his Star of David, rasping out the words in Hebrew. Beside him Amir sang in Arabic, the strain making his claws come out and bite down deeply into his prayer mat as his fangs made it difficult to speak. The demon was screaming out through the little girls vocal chords, pained by their attempts but even their powers combined weren’t enough. The circle of chanting wiccans were barely keeping the girl contained within the pentagram. Stiles had to do this. He had to cast her out so that Amber could perform the banishing. He had to be the one and he couldn’t!
“Okay, okay,” Amber said to herself as she ran her finger down the page. “It says here that the talisman you hold needs to be a focus of your belief. You are a Christian, right?”
“Of course,” said Stiles.
“Really? I mean do you really believe in it with your heart and soul?”
Stiles looked down at the crossed pieces of wood. He went to church a few times a year and he wrote it down on forms but did he really believe in it? Not really. Not in the way you’re supposed to. He believed in the vague concept of God but it wasn’t a cast iron thing that he could throw his soul into, knowing it would be caught on the other side.
Stiles’ existential crisis was broken as the table they were leaning on split in two. He managed to roll out the way as it splintered into pieces. On the other side of the room Amber slunk back behind a book case, protecting herself. Her head was bleeding but she was alive.
One of the guys at the corner of the holding pentagram was lying on the floor, hopefully just unconscious. The others were still gripping his hand tight, trying to take the strain but holding the pattern was ten times more difficult the second one of them went down. Smoke was beginning to curl from Nathan’s hand and Amir’s prayer mat but they kept repeating the words. They believed in their faith. Despite everything they had been through and seen, they believed in it totally.
What did Stiles believe in like that? Nothing. He’d lived a life with too much uncertainty and death that he’d learned to only half trust everything. Usually it stopped him from getting killed but right now it was really biting him in the ass!
Another bolt crackled out, hitting the shelf above him sending a cascade of photos and mementos scattering across the floor. There it was lying in front of him. He snatched it up and stood holding it out towards the girl.
“I drive you out, whoever you may be you bastard, unwashed, unclean, stinky assed spirit. If you’re the devil, if you’re just some low-ass demon, if you are a mother loving alien, I drive you from my goddamn house!”
The demon shrieked and screamed, thrashing against the confines of its invisible prison but Stiles gripped harder at the plastic figure in his hand: a black wolf with red eyes. Derek had given it to him for his seventeenth birthday and if there was anything in this world that Stiles believed in undeniably, it was Derek. He could feel the power flowing through him into the toy and outwards towards the demon. He pushed forward, throwing everything he was into his words, pouring every ounce of love he felt for Derek into that tiny wolf and knowing that it was stronger than anything else in his world.
He felt a return jolt of energy flowing through him as he hit against a wall of resistance. In his mind’s eye he saw him and Derek in their early days, standing in the woods as Stiles told Derek to leave him alone, he was just a fuck buddy, he didn’t want this. He felt his resolve falter for a moment but knew it what happened next. He remembered lying in bed only a few weeks later, warm in Derek’s arms as they mumbled their first I love yous. He recalled the image now, remembering the smell of Derek’s sweat, the way his skin felt and the sound of the birds singing outside when he’d woken that morning, happy and finally whole.
The demon let out a wave of green effluent that narrowly missed Stiles face, splattering on his white coat, burning holes where it touched. He could see the misty outline of the demon stuttering as it broke away from the little girl.
He could feel Derek’s hands around his throat, claws digging in, blood trickling down his neck. Stiles didn’t even twitch to remove the hands from where they squeezed. It was a lie. There was no way that Derek would ever try to kill him. Even if he were possessed by the Devil himself, Derek would never do that.
Stiles counteracted. The air was warm, heady with the smell of the jasmine that grew outside the hotel window. Stiles was curled up under the white bed sheet, unwilling to get up even though they needed to check out. It would mean the end of their blissful vacation, a whole week their biggest enemy had been the pirate captain on the miniature golf course. Derek crawled up beside him, tenting the covers with his arm. The diffused light surrounded lit his face with a heavenly glow. Derek laughed and it was like seeing the face of god.
Black bile vomited out of the possessed girl. The wiccans holding the pentagram were screaming but still held hands in a death grip, even the one who was unconscious was held by her two sisters. The misty form of the demon floated up out of the girl and snapped back. They nearly had it.
“Now Amber now!”
She leapt forward and began to perform the banishment spell, drawing every ounce of energy she could to cast whatever it was back into the pit it had crawled from.
In a final effort to thwart Stiles, the demon conjured a bloody form on the floor. Derek, cut in half, his legs lying on the other side of the room. His eyes were dead and there was blood everywhere. Rage flooded Stiles. He knew this scene. It was his from his own nightmares, plucked out and played before him. He took his anger and threw it back a hundred fold at the floating girl ahead of him.
There was a high pitched scream that seemed to pierce through into his brain. His vision went white. He had to slam his hands to his ears, dropping the figurine to the floor. There was a silent explosion, a wave of force emanating out from the centre of the room knocking Stiles off his feet and slamming him into the wall behind him. His ears ringing it took a moment from him to see straight but when he opened his eyes he saw that the girl had returned to lying on the bed. One of the coven, he couldn’t see which, was crouched at the girls bedside, checking her pulse cautiously.
“She’s alive. I think- I think it worked.”
There was a cascade of relieved sighs and weeping as the group let themselves collapse, a job well done.
“I don’t know why we let you live with us Stiles,” said Amber picking her way through the wreckage. “All you ever do is bring us trouble. Last month it was that thing with all the scales and the tentacles, now it’s this.”
“You’d be so bored if I wasn’t here,” said Stiles.
“It is worth it though,” said Amber.
She looked back to the little girl on the bed. She’d rolled onto her side in her sleep and pulled Stiles pillow in, hugging it like a soft toy. The door burst open and the girl’s stricken parents tumbled in, drawn by the sudden absence of noise. They swarmed over their little girl as she made whimpers of complaint about being woken up from her nap. Amber was right. There was a reason he did all this.
Beside him, Amber stooped and picked up the figure he’d dropped in the blast from off the floor. She laughed, that slightly manic laugh a person got after they’d nearly died half a dozen times in given day and the exhaustion has set in.
“Seriously. Your boyfriend?”
Stiles snatched the miniature wolf back off of her and ran his fingers over the pointed ears. One of the legs had melted slightly but it was still recognisably a wolf. His wolf.
“Never underestimate the undeniable power of human love,” said Stiles.
The sound of his ring tone seemed unnaturally loud and shrill and Stiles slipped out of the room to answer it. He was expecting it to be the police or a neighbour calling about the noise but he wasn’t surprised to see Derek’s caller ID.
“What’s up sourwolf?” Stiles asked.
“Uh, um, I dunno,” said Derek. He sounded confused. “I just… I had a funny feeling, thought I should call you. Anything up?”
Stiles held up the wolf so that they were looking each other in the eye.
“Just a little a demon possession. Same old, same old.”
“Demons? I thought they didn’t exist.”
“Apparently they do,” said Stiles. “It’s dead now. I think. The coven helped me take care of it.”
“Oh. Your new pack,” said Derek. It was slightly bitter but not with any real seriousness. Derek had gotten over the jealousy by the end of his first year but they still teased each other about it.
“They’re my friends. I’ll only ever have one pack.”
“Damn right. But you’re all okay?”
“Yes. Well someone was unconscious but I’d be worried if someone wasn’t. It’s not the end if no one’s been knocked out yet.”
Derek laughed, soft and gentle. It would still be afternoon back home. Derek was probably still at work, making the criminals of Beacon Hills flock to the police station so that they could be arrested by BHPDs sexiest new officer. The thought of Derek in his uniform made Stiles ache with longing to be with him. The replay of all their best moments interspersed with the times he’d nearly lost him wasn’t helping on the ‘not missing Derek all the time’ front.
“Thank you,” said Stiles.
“For what?” asked Derek still laughing.
“For everything. Look, I have to go… clean the demon vomit off of my bedroom wall.”
“You have to what?”
“I’ll tell you about it next week,” said Stiles.
“Can’t wait to see you again,” said Derek. Stiles was pretty certain that there were parts of Stiles that Derek was looking forward to seeing far more than the others when he came up to visit next weekend. Hopefully they’d have the house back up to a liveable standard by then. If not then Derek could help fix the furniture. He’d always looked good in a tool belt.
“I miss you and I love you and blah,” said Stiles as he yawned.
“And blah?” said Derek. “That’s a new one. Look I’ve got to go. I’m using my cell at my desk and now your Dad is glaring at me.”
“Alright. I’ll let you go,” said Stiles. “Don’t get shot.”
“Don’t get eviscerated.”
They laughed, said their goodbyes and hung up. Stiles had been fiddling with the wolf all the way through the call. He kissed it on the nose before putting it in his pocket before going back into the chaos of the room.
The first thing that Stiles heard when he walked into the room was someone shrieking about getting demon excrement in their eyes.
Yup. Same old, same old. It was going to be a long night.