• Grace Stilinski •

„And into the forest I go,
to lose my mind
and find my soul."

It was the perfect plan, if you could even call it that. Mason was now in on it, too, pacing restlessly around Liam's room while he had gone down to the basement in the meantime to look for something alcoholic for the bonfire without being noticed.

"W-we're really doing this, aren't we?" began Mason, nervously interlacing his hands. The two girls nodded, one more determined than the other. Grace had both arms crossed and was looking blankly at the floor of the boys' room. She had found it as she would have imagined it; not too neat, but not messy either. The walls were painted blue and the closet was a kind of sports locker like those found in the high school dressing rooms.

Grace's thoughts at that moment, however, were merely on the list and her brother, whose harsh words echoed in her head.

"I found a bottle - I think it's rum - here. Do any of you speak Spanish?" asked Liam as he entered his room, his blue eyes fixed on the label of a transparent bottle with a golden liquid before looking up and into the glum faces of his friends. "You okay?"

The three exchanged fleeting glances before Mason closed the door behind his best friend. "It's best if you sit down."

"Did something happen?" he inquired in response, his eyes wide and seeming not to understand what they wanted from him as they stood around him as if in intervention. "What's this about?"

"We just want to talk to you," Faye began gently, looking to the other two for help. But when they couldn't find the right words themselves, she continued, "We can tell you're not feeling well, that something's wrong."

"What's not right?" asked Liam, confused, rising again. Increasing anger grew in his gaze, alongside the panic that lit up in the blue. "I'm fine!"

"Dude, you're sleeping outside Grace's room, constantly disappearing and pulling a face like Chucky the doll is going to be in front of you at any moment," Mason interjected, looking firmly at the blond without breaking eye contact. "We just want to help you."

"I don't need help," he pressed out and began to pace the room excitedly. "You guys got it wrong, it's all right!"

Grace finally had enough, she pulled the list out of her pocket and silently placed it on the table in front of him. Liam turned pale. "Where did you get this?"

"Unimportant." Grace took a step toward the blond so that she was standing directly in front of him and could look into his blue eyes. "Now you listen to me, Liam," she hissed, "my name is on that list, too, and I want to know damn well why!"

He gulped, she could tell by the way his Adam's apple bounced with alarm. Overwhelmed, he took a step back and averted his eyes. His hands balled into fists and he merely glared at his friends instead of responding to her question. "I still don't understand what you want from me! I don't know why your name is on this list Grace, I just want to clear my head with my friends tonight, get drunk and forget about this fucking dead pool!" The boy had talked himself into such a rage that no one made a sound after that.

"Sorry, we really didn't mean to offend you. But if you want to talk, we're here for you," Mason then gently explained to him and had finally turned tail first, holding his hands in the air in surrender.

Faye exchanged a disappointed look with Grace. But there was probably no point in continuing their interrogation if they didn't want to destroy their friendship or draw out Liam, who had a problem with aggression anyway.

The rest of the evening passed tensely as the four watched a movie on Liam's bed before they would leave for the event. They could already hear the rather peculiar music in the parking lot, and the smoke was already so pungent from there that Grace merely took in as much air as she needed, as the ash burned in her lungs like sandpaper.

Faye pulled a face like ten days of rainy weather, because she had certainly not come along voluntarily, "The last time you left me alone, I found a dead body!", Grace hissed at her, when she almost turned around, at the loud bawling of her classmates. This statement and the fact that the name of two of her new friends were on a dead pool probably made her stay with a scowl.

The friends leisurely approached the campfire, which was already burning brightly in the form of a lightning bolt on a meadow in the midst of the crowd of their fellow students. Grace let her eyes wander over the pack, looking for a familiar face, but she was only blinded by the colorful spotlights.

However, she couldn't make out more than the raised arms of the teenagers who accompanied the DJ behind the mixing desk with their movements. As they did so, the enormous loudspeakers boomed the electro music over the entire area.

Grace didn't have to look around to notice that most of it was already pretty beat up. Mason, meanwhile, looked around beaming and rubbed his hands together. "Let's get the fun started."

The friends first decided to sit down on a bench a little away from the commotion, with Faye's dark eyes darting back and forth uneasily every now and then. She didn't seem to have exaggerated with her statement that she couldn't stand crowds.

Before reaching the school, the four of them had made a quick stop at the local Walmart, and so now each of them held a bottle of Coke in their hands as they passed around Liam's rum.

Grace had never drunk alcohol before, which is why she didn't know exactly what the mixing ratio was. However, she didn't want to hold back, because as much as she had already heard about the effects of alcohol, she knew it couldn't hurt her considering her emotional state.

Liam seemed to have a similar opinion, for he spared rather little of the amber liquid and began downing it immediately as well. The pungent smell was already burning Grace's nose, although she had not even smelled her mixed drink directly.

Hesitantly, she now put the bottle to her mouth herself. As much as the smell had already burned her nose, it was nothing to the way the bitter taste now burned her throat like fire.

Grace wondered how anyone could drink such a thing willingly and set the bottle back down for a brief moment. Faye looked at her with wide eyes, while her own drink was probably 97% coke and 3% rum. It was no wonder then that she sipped from the neck of the bottle without even batting an eye. Her gaze, meanwhile, flitted to a group of her classmates that included Nolan, who waved one of his crutches at them.

"If he's drunk enough..." the dark-haired girl put in, nodding over to him with a smile, "will you go up to him and ask him if he remembers me?"

Grace almost choked and started snorting, making Mason slap her back. She raised an eyebrow. "So so, no wonder you don't want anything more from Brett."

She smiled innocently back and shrugged, but as she did, a telltale blush crept onto her cheeks that she couldn't blame on the alcohol or the heat of the fire. As it seemed, Nolan was to Faye as she was to Lucas Bolton from her old school, for he too did not seem to take the slightest notice of the poor love-struck girl.

Love was a cruel thing.

Again Grace's gaze drifted back to the still generously filled plastic bottle. She sighed, after all, one more sip couldn't hurt. Maybe she just needed to get used to the unfamiliar taste? Once, she had also detested coffee, and now she even liked to drink it from time to time. At least with lots of milk and sugar.

Once again the dark liquid burned in her throat, but in fact it wasn't quite as bad as it had been the first time. In fact, it was hardly disgusting anymore, and before she knew it, she had just about emptied the entire bottle. Grace didn't know exactly what had prompted her to take several swigs at once and even top it off; possibly the rum and coke she had downed earlier.

Liam seemed to share her opinion, because by now he had downed the entire bottle in one go, not even flinching. "Do you guys think I should slow down?"

"After all the shit that's been going on..." muttered Mason, nodding affirmatively at his friend, "I think you should keep drinking. You should get drunk and by that I mean trip and fall on your ass. Drunk with your head hanging out in the toilet bowl."

"Why?" he asked with a laugh.

"Because then, when I ask you what's going on, you might be too drunk to lie or avoid the subject," he replied with an increasingly serious expression on his face, thus cutting into their previous argument one more time.

Grace's bottle rested in her hand and nearly fell to the floor. She had never seen Mason with such an expression. The latter sighed when Liam made no effort to respond, merely averting his eyes. "We want to help you."

Instead of answering, the young lacrosse player rose, but Grace was now long past paying attention to her friends. Instead, several faces had burned themselves into her memory.

Her mom.

She took another sip.

Tracy.

Was she as bad as she claimed?

The man with no mouth.

Was he after her?

Garett and Violet.

The bottle was almost empty.

Lucas and Coralie.

She didn't want to go back to boarding school.

Stiles.

It was her fault.

When she spotted Scott pushing his way through the dancing crowd with Malia, she took another sip. One last one, because her bottle was as empty as a water hole in the Sahara.

Immediately the alcohol began to go to her head a little. Who cared about Stiles hating her or that her name was on a death pool. Life could be so simple if you lightened it up a little, she merely thought.

Her thoughts and memories of the entire evening became more and more fuzzy and hazy, like a huge dark cloud that had settled somewhere far in the back of her mind, just waiting for her to sleep it off. But sleep was suddenly out of the question, on the contrary. In spite of the fact that she felt completely exhausted mentally as well as physically, sleep was simply impossible at that moment.

The night was still young.

With a jerk, Grace got up, which turned out to be a very bad idea. Fortunately, at the last moment she was able to grab the edge of the bench before she would have toppled straight over in front. With shaky steps, she staggered back.

"Are you all right?" asked Faye, who had also risen to support her.

"Everythin's fine."

"How much did you drink?" shouted Scott suddenly against the noise, re-entering Grace's consciousness. She protectively held a red party cup in front of her face, which had been lying on the bench, hoping not to be recognized if she hid behind it. That would be trouble.

Liam also staggered, apparently the alcohol had an effect on him. At least after the fact. Malia, who had been moving Scott to the bench, was also completely out of it.

Grace seemed to have suddenly forgotten that she had actually wanted to keep her identity a secret, because the cup slipped from her hand and she glared at her brother's best friend. "Did Stiles send you again?" she bitched at him, slurring her words as she fell back onto the bench. "I can take care of myself!"

But it seemed Scott hadn't kept his hands off the booze either, because he stumbled back a step, squinted his eyes, and looked at his hand as if he were seeing double. Grace snorted. "What a great rescue squad."

"How much have you had to drink?" asked Mason, too, who hadn't missed the eleventh grader's change in mood. Scott blinked. "Nothing at all. Not even a little sip."

It didn't look like that in the least, though, because the next moment he was groggily propping himself up against the back of the bench and closing his eyes as if he had a severe headache. Then he looked up again. "It's not the drinks. It's the music. We need to have them turned off right now!"

"I'm for that, too," Grace mumbled, leaning her head, which was suddenly as heavy as if it were filled with pure lead, against Faye's shoulder. "The music really sucks."

She merely caught, as if from a veil, Scott beginning to push his way through the crowd, but at that moment she had entirely different problems than the grotty music. "I'm sick, I think I have to..."

"We better go back there," Faye hastily suggested, pulling her to her feet, which felt like jello. While her friend pulled her in the opposite direction from the whole spectacle, Grace felt as if she had been transported to a horror movie. Everything seemed to be moving toward each other and the ground was spinning. Carefully, she felt her way across the grass with her feet before she got used to the unfamiliar feeling of dizziness.

Did it just seem that way to her or was the place more crowded than it had been twenty minutes before? She suddenly felt so dizzy and it seemed as if the meadow was getting more and more crowded and at the same time narrower. Or were her eyes just playing tricks on her? Maybe it was all just her imagination, a nasty nightmare, and the bonfire hadn't even happened yet, or maybe she had never returned to Beacon Hills? Maybe none of it had ever happened?

Convinced by this thought, Grace closed her eyes and stubbornly tried to wake up from this bad dream, which felt more real and at the same time incredibly surreal with every passing moment.

"I don't think anyone sees you here," Faye finally brought her out of her thoughts, and only now did she realize that they had stopped in front of a patch of woods. Once again Grace felt something climbing up her throat and the next moment she was running between the tree trunks with her hair held, releasing the alcohol she had consumed back to the wild.

When she thought that her stomach was completely empty and probably not a single drop of alcohol could be left in her system, she returned to her new friend. She didn't know whether to feel better or more miserable now. "You okay?"

Grace nodded as her legs shook. The fog was gone from her mind, but her mood was tilted. "Let's go back," she muttered, cautiously putting one foot in front of the other as the bass of the awful music cut to her core.

As the bench they had been sitting on earlier came into view, Grace knew immediately that something was wrong. "Where are the others?" asked Faye, turning to Mason, who was the only one still there.

"Security took them," he explained dejectedly, looking at Grace. "You're lucky they didn't spot you the way you staggered."

The addressed rolled her eyes, but before she could interject, someone else had. A fellow student who seemed to have been watching the spectacle. "A crap security that is. Just threw Mason to the ground like they were trying to start a fight themselves."

The three exchanged confused glances before Grace's blue eyes fell on the rum bottle in Mason's hand. "Have you been holding that the whole time?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Then why didn't they take you when they kick out drunk students," Faye concluded, her dark eyes wide in horror. "Scott, Malia, Liam, they were all on these lists that are now available all over town!"

Mason's jaw dropped. "You mean..."

"Hit men."

"Shit."

"Scott said it's the music we're supposed to take out!" Mason hastily interjected, but Grace merely frowned at him. "Yeah, because the music sucks, I-"

"You turn it off and we'll look for the others!" yelled Faye against the loud electric music, also pulling the brunette along with her, who not only almost fell forward once due to her still slight tipsiness.

"Where are we supposed to look?" cried Grace, gasping and almost throwing up again. "Who knows where they took them!"

"Well, where would you take someone you wanted to kill as quickly as possible and unseen at a party?" she asked, having stopped by now. Her brown eyes were dilated with excitement and her cheeks were all pink. Grace shrugged her shoulders. "To where no one goes."

"And where no student goes voluntarily on a Friday night?"

"To church? The school? The... The school!" she groaned, heart pounding, and spun around once. Almost immediately, she noticed the back entrance that she had also used the night of the lacrosse game. It almost seemed as if the events were repeating themselves. Now it was her who was inexorably pulling Faye along with her.

Behind a hedge, the two girls finally came to a stop, for the door was wide open and indeed Grace could see men there in uniforms usually worn only by security. She craned her head and discovered three slumped figures cowering on the floor; Scott, Liam and Malia.

An acrid smell rose to her nostrils as a bald man emptied a red canister over the teenagers. Surely he wasn't going to...? Faye drew in a sharp breath as he pulled out a lighter and held it directly in Scott's face. As he did so, an ugly grin graced his greedy face. 

Grace's heartbeat quickened, they had to do something! Her body jerked forward, but Faye held her back. "Your name is on the list too!"

"We can't just watch them die," she choked out. Her friend swallowed. "We will..."

But Grace was never to know her plan, for at that moment an almost eerie silence enveloped her and it took her a moment to understand what had changed. The music, it had been turned off and with it Scott's daze. For he reacted immediately. With his bare hand he crushed that of the fake security officer in which he had been holding the lighter. The sickening crack spoke for itself.

But that wasn't what caught Grace's attention. It was his blood-red eyes shining in the darkness, and this time she hadn't possibly imagined them. The two girls looked at each other and the young Stilinski was pretty sure they had come to the same conclusion at that moment.

Scott McCall was not human.