FINALLY BUT WEIRDLY, ALL OF THE CROWS dropped dead and were lying on the floor of the classroom. There were feathers and bird blood covering all of the desks that were in shambles, and the students were slowly starting to stand up and look around once they knew for sure that it was safe for them to do so.

"You okay?" Allison asked her as they both stood up and looked around the classroom full of dead birds.

She quizzed, "You?"

"Fine," Allison answered. Everyone around the room looked terrified, and people were calling their parents left and right. "What just happened?"

"No clue. Do you think it has something to do with the deer?" the Carter girl questioned, thinking back to the previous night. Something was definitely wrong, and the animals knew it. Allison shook her head, letting her know she had no clue.

After texting her mom to let her know that she was fine and that she didn't need to be picked up, Wren made her way over to Stiles who was typing something rapidly on his phone. "What are you doing?"

"Calling Scott," he replied before dialing the boy's number and putting his on speaker phone so that she could hear as they both moved to the back of the classroom so that everyone else couldn't. When the McCall boy picked up, he started talking. "We got a serious problem at school. Ms. Blake's class—"

"Can you tell me about it later?" Scott questioned, cutting his friend off through the phone. Stiles and Wren made confused faces at each other, wondering what was happening on his end.

The blonde girl leaned into the phone, talking to her friend with a stern voice so that he knew she was serious, "Uh, well, no. Pretty sure this qualifies for immediate discussion."

"All right, then meet me at Derek's house," the werewolf told them.

"Derek's house? What?" Stiles quizzed, glancing at the Carter girl next to him with furrowed eyebrows, and she just shrugged in response. "What the hell are you doing at—"

The McCall boy interrupted him once again. "Just meet us here, okay?" Then, he hung up, and the Stilinski boy pulled his keys out of his pocket, tossing them in his hand.

"Let's go, then."

《❀》

"YEAH, I SEE IT. TWO BANDS, RIGHT?" Derek said after staring at Scott's arm with his Alpha eyes. They were all at Derek's house, and the McCall boy was asking him how he got his tattoo to not heal. "What does it mean?"

Isaac was lying unconscious on the table next to Wren, and she was poking him every five seconds to see if he would wake up. Derek didn't know what happened, but he was still alive and breathing. So, he wasn't worried.

Scott shrugged before taking two fingers and drawing a circle inside of another circle in the dust on the table with his fingers. "I don't know...It's just something I trace with my fingers."

"Why is this so important to you?" Derek questioned, looking up at the younger male with a questioning look.

The McCall sighed. "Do you know what the word 'tattoo' means?"

"To mark something," Stiles answered quickly for Derek, remembering what the man said at the tattoo parlor the night before when they asked about the meaning of Scott's tattoo.

"Well, that's in Tahitian. In Samoan, it means 'open wound,'" he informed them. "I knew I wanted to get a tattoo when I turned eighteen. I always wanted one. I just decided to get it now, to make it kind of a reward."

The Alpha furrowed his eyebrows. "For what?"

Scott answered, staring down at the ground, "For not calling or texting Allison all summer. Even when I really wanted to, even when it was so hard not to sometimes. I was trying to give her the space she wants. Going four months later, it still hurts. It still feels like a, uh..."

"Like an open wound," the blonde girl finished for him, her gaze finally shifting from the boy that she hadn't seen all summer to him to make eye contact with him. She knew how that felt.

Scott nodded, and Derek reached over and picked up the blow torch next to him, getting ready to light it because apparently, that was the only way the tattoo would stay on their skin. "The pain's gonna be worse than anything you've ever felt."

"Oh, that's great," the Stilinski boy muttered.

Wren furrowed her eyebrows at him in confusion. "You're not even the one getting set on fire." He just stuck his tongue out at her in response, and she rolled her eyes.

"Do it," Scott ordered Derek. The Hale man followed his orders and lit the blowtorch, and it made a whirring as blue and orange fire began shooting out of one end.

"Oh, wow," Stiles exclaimed, his eyes widening at the flame. If he couldn't handle needles, how the hell was he supposed to deal with fire. "That's a lot for me, so I'm gonna take that as my cue. I'm just gonna wait outside."

The Alpha just grabbed him and spun him right back around toward his best friend. The sheriff's son groaned at the werewolf's tight grip on his arm. "Nope. You can help hold him down."

"Oh, God," Wren muttered as her friend walked over and grabbed onto Scott's shoulders. The McCall boy nodded to Derek, and the Hale brought the blow torch closer and closer to his skin until the flame touched him.

Scott yelled in pain, his fangs came out and eyes turning yellow as he struggled against the grips of both Derek and Stiles. The Hale man shouted over the screams, "Hold him!"

The Carter girl forced herself to look away and tried to think about something else to keep her mind off her friend in pain. She just stared at the unconscious Isaac and imagined what he would look like with a mustache.

About halfway through the tattoo process, the screams stopped, and Wren thought that he had died for a second. However, he had just passed out, so after they were done, he jerked awake. He examined his arm in awe and exclaimed, "It worked!"

"Well, it looks pretty damn permanent now," Stiles pointed out after his friend got his shirt back on and they were making their way out of the house.

"Yeah," Scott nodded. "I kind of needed something permanent. Everything that's happening to us, everything just changes so fast. Everything's so, uh...ephemeral."

The blonde girl's jaw almost dropped at that. He didn't usually use words longer than two syllables, sometimes three, and here he was. "Look at Scotty, using the big boy words."

"Studying for the PSATs?" the Stilinski boy questioned.

The McCall boy nodded in response. He had really been trying to get his grades back up over the summer, so he had actual read books and memorized vocabulary. "Yep."

"Nice," Stiles replied.

Scott went to open the door for them, but when he did, something caught his eye. He just stood there for a moment, staring at the door and running his fingers along it. He called to Derek, "You painted the door...Why'd you paint the door?"

"Go home, Scott," the Hale man ordered with an expression that was pleading the boy not to ask.

"Why is it so weird that he painted his door?" Wren furrowed her eyebrows, looking to everyone with a confused expression. "My mom paints something in the house, like, every other week."

The werewolves just ignored her, and Scott continued to run his fingers against the red wood. "And why only one side?"

"Scott," Derek warned, walking over, but it was too late. Scott was already claw at the paint, ripping it off the door violently and grunting as he did so. Afterward, it revealed some weird symbol painted on it in black, and the Carter girl was still so baffled. What the hell just happened?

"The birds at school and the deer last night, just like the night I got trampled by the deer when I got bit by the Alpha," Scott muttered in realization, looking to the Hale man. "How many are there?"

He sighed, "A pack of 'em. An Alpha Pack."

"That sounds really bad," the blonde girl pointed out, and they all shot her a look, telling her that the fact that she just stated was pretty obvious already.

Stiles had a better comment, and it was a question. "All of them? How does that even work?"

"I hear there's some kind of leader. He's called Deucalion," Derek informed them. There's an Alpha of the Alpha pack? Doesn't that, like, defeat the purpose of them all being Alphas? "We know they have Boyd and Erica. Peter, Isaac, and I have been looking for them for the last four months."

"Let's say you find them — how do you deal with an Alpha Pack?" the McCall boy questioned, taking a couple of steps toward the Hale man with question in his eyes.

Derek looked down at the ground before his gaze met Scott's once again. "With all the help I can get."

"Where is she?" came a groggy voice from behind them, and they all whipped their heads around to see that Isaac was awake and sitting up. "Where's the girl?"

"What girl?"