• Grace Stilinski •

„Not everything is
as it seems.
Look closer."

Sighing, Grace had followed her brother. She was beginning to worry about her common sense, that she kept helping him with his crazy ideas. However, she couldn't deny that doing things like breaking into the school's administrative office tickled her fingers, too. As the daughter of a sheriff, this inexplicable desire for a little rebellion probably couldn't be avoided.

Stiles was outrageously lucky because the office was unoccupied at this hour and the teachers, as well as students, were now in their classes. He began to dig a wire out of his pocket and then tampered the lock with it. Grace stared at his nimble hands with a mixture of admiration and suspicion. He was much better at this than she was. Or maybe he just had more practice.

The lock clicked in record time and triumphantly her brother pulled the door open. The smell that wafted toward Grace reminded her of her first day of school at Beacon Hills High. It was a mixture of mothballs and old coffee. Stiles slipped into the room and was about to pull the door shut behind her again when Grace stopped it with her foot. With raised eyebrows, she stared at him. If she was going to be talked into something like this, she wanted to be in on the exciting part too.

"I need you to stand guard," Stiles explained to her. His sister rolled her blue eyes. "That's the only reason you brought me along?"

He shrugged. "It's not like I could have known you'd be interested in digging around in those dusty boxes, too."

Grace groaned, actually having little desire to stand around alone in the hallway and make up some far-fetched story should someone try to enter the office. She fought a stare-down with her brother, but when neither of them threatened to back down, she took her foot off the door, crossed her arms in front of her chest, and was about to make a suggestion to him when she guessed she had lost. Before she could even open her mouth, Stiles grinned triumphantly at her. "You're the best, sis!"

And then she merely had the rickety white door in her face. "Stiles!" she groaned in protest, but of course got no more response. Grace weighed whether she should just run away and leave Stiles to his fate, but she was curious to see if his doubts would be confirmed. So she dutifully stood guard outside the administration office, glad that she didn't have to answer to anyone who came by.

Finally, a little later, Stiles peeled himself out of the door again. In his hand was a greenish piece of paper that Grace hoped was merely copied. With a searching glance to the left and right, he made sure they were alone and finally pulled the rickety door shut behind him again. He did not bother to lock it again. With hurried steps he dragged his sister along the corridor.

"What did you find?" hissed Grace, fixing the note with her blue eyes. Stiles directed her to a quiet corner and pulled another piece of paper from his pocket. It was the signed report of the traffic ticket Parrish had printed out for him. He now held both documents side by side and skimmed them. Grace didn't quite know what he was looking for, but finally he tapped triumphantly on the signature of the guardian. "Ha!"

"What?"

"That's not the same signature," he muttered. "It's his father's signature. It was signed by two completely different people. Look, the squiggles and even the slant are completely different!"

Grace frowned. He was right, the signature did not look remotely the same. But what exactly did that say now? That his father was not the same person from back then? "And that means...?"

"I have to show Scott!" decided Stiles, hurrying away. Shaking her head, Grace watched him disappear into the library down the hall, muttering after him, "Well, thanks a lot, too."

Sighing, she adjusted her backpack and now began to put her actual plan into action. With rising anticipation, she walked down the path her brother had rushed along earlier, but stopped at the bulletin board in front of the library. Countless notices of missing items, especially bicycles, were piled there, along with calls for students to offer themselves as tutors and lists for school teams.

Grace stretched her head and blew a brown curl out of her face as she hastily skimmed the latter. Finally, the register for the swim team jumped into her eye, where one could sign up for selection practice. A smile crept onto her face as she rummaged in her school bag for a pen and thereupon put her name with the others. While swimming didn't come close to her love of fencing, at least she would finally be able to pursue a hobby again.

In good spirits, she continued on her way, not even faltering when she saw Tracy at her locker. If her former friend could pretend she didn't exist, she could too! Undeterred, she threw her backpack into the locker and took out only the things she would need for her next class, as well as her phone. A glance at the screen told her that her free period would be over in about ten minutes, and sighing, she was about to make her way to the classroom when her eyes fell on Tracy again.

She had her dark eyes pointed right in her direction, but seemed to be looking straight through them. Her trembling hand rested on the light blue door of her locker and her breathing was rapid and intermittent. Grace paused and stared at her. "Tracy?"

All she got in reply was a whimper from her quivering lips. Her manicured fingernails scraped the metal of the locker door in an unattractive sound, causing the fine hairs on Grace's arms to stand up. Utterly terrified, Tracy still stared straight past her and her panicked breathing quickened. Seeking help, Grace looked around the hallway, wondering what to do. Was her former friend having a panic attack or some kind of seizure? Was it just a lousy joke and she was just trying to get back at her?

Before Grace had made a decision, Lydia was suddenly at her side. The redhead touched Tracy gently on her arm, seeming to finally snap her out of her trance-like state. Tracy's eyes now wandered restlessly around the room, narrowed when she caught sight of Grace, and finally lingered on Lydia, who eyed her anxiously. "Come on, let's go outside for a bit," she suggested, leading a deeply puzzled Tracy down the hall.

Completely perplexed, Grace stared after them and reviewed the moment. Did her classmate possibly have deeper psychological problems? She thought about the way Tracy had looked at her since she had returned to Beacon Hills. Had she perhaps been the trigger? Her eyes fell on the still-open locker door. Where Tracy had clutched it, there were now deep indentations. Almost as if the metal had been torn open by the claws of an animal.

No, it couldn't be. Grace shook her head vehemently. Probably by now she was so disturbed by the supernatural realities of Beacon Hills that she was beginning to hallucinate. Tracy was definitely not a werewolf! There had to be another explanation for the deep scratch marks. She just couldn't think of it yet.

Other students were crowding the hallway by now, reminding Grace that her next class would begin in a few minutes. Even though she and Tracy were no longer on particularly good terms, Grace still closed her open and rowdy locker door. She hugged the book tightly to her chest and clutched it with her trembling fingers, which had already turned all white. As she did so, she searched her mind for possible clues that her former best friend was indeed howling at the moon at night. But she could think of nothing.

It reassured her and underpin that she was merely paranoid. There was certainly something else going on with Tracy. Something that was the trigger for her panic attack. Something psychic and certainly nothing supernatural. Still a little shaky, Grace finally settled into her English class. She barely noticed Nolan, who was giving her confused looks. Presumably it hadn't escaped his notice that something was bothering her.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," he finally remarked from beside her. He smiled slightly as he said this, but it seemed more like a pitiful attempt to lighten the situation a bit. Grace returned it half-heartedly, but couldn't possibly tell him about what she had just witnessed. Nolan, after all, knew nothing of the supernatural, and if it did involve something along those lines, she would have to come up with far-fetched excuses.

"I'm just still a little tired," she tried to talk her way out of it and waved it off. Then she turned back to the front, where the teacher had begun his lesson. She felt her classmate's gaze on her for quite a while, but tried to ignore it studiously. She kept tapping her pencil restlessly on the table. She was supposed to talk to Liam, Faye, and Mason about it, but they were in another class right now. Her friends would be able to tell her for sure that she was nuts. Or they would agree with her that it certainly wasn't normal with Tracy....

She hadn't been able to concentrate on class all day. Again and again she had looked for Tracy in the corridors and in the classes, but she had not reappeared. Her seats in class remained empty and a small crowd had formed around her locker by the end of the school day. Grace had to push her way through the crowd of students to get to her own. In the process, she picked up a few phrases from the onlookers:

"What the heck could have bent the sheet metal like that?"

"Looks like from the claws of a wild animal."

"Do you think there's a coyote running around the school?"

"A coyote never has paws that big."

"Tracy has always been a little strange..."

Nolan, who had accompanied Grace to her locker, looked at the battered locker as well. His ice-blue eyes widened. "What happened here?"

Shrugging her shoulders, Grace set about getting her backpack out of the locker and packing it with the things she needed for homework. "I don't know."

She was stared at by her classmate without understanding. He probably couldn't believe that she didn't seem to find the scratch marks a little disturbing. Little did he know that the uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach was only growing as a result.

"Hey, what's going on here?" asked Liam as he joined in. His gaze now flew to Tracy's locker as well, and his expression dropped almost instantly. His blue eyes found Grace's, then looked to Nolan, who looked back and forth between them, uncomprehending. It was probably not lost on him that the two were communicating without words.

Liam bit his lips and leaned against one of the other lockers. Finally, he addressed the floor to Nolan. "Um... I need to talk to Grace about something in private," he said somewhat rudely, now looking at his classmate promptly. He didn't seem to like Nolan very much, Grace had already been able to tell. Quite the opposite of Faye, who had a crush on the boy with the freckles.

"Sure..." he mumbled in response, a little taken off guard, and looked to Grace. With a quick raise of his hand, he said his goodbyes before his gaze fled to the scratch marks one last time. "I'll see you tomorrow, then."

"See you then," Grace added before turning back to Liam. "Could you get any flashier?"

"We had to get rid of him somehow," he grumbled, throwing both hands in the air to punctuate his statement. "Besides, I think he's a little creepy. Have you looked at his eyes? Like a psycho's!"

"Have you looked at your eyes?" sighed Grace, alluding to his golden glowing werewolf eyes. This seemed to remind her classmate of something. With a motion of his head, he nodded to the locker behind her. "Speaking of.... What happened to it?"

"Tracy," she explained quietly, fishing her now packed backpack off the floor. Together, they finally got moving, following the stream of students down the hall. "Do you think she's... you know... is like you?"

Liam pulled the corners of his mouth down thoughtfully. "You're sure that was her with the locker?"

Was it her? The sounds of scraping fingernails across sheet metal had actually been pretty clear. But couldn't it also be that the indentations had been there before? Maybe that was what had Tracy so disturbed in the first place?

"You two!" a voice suddenly called from behind the two sophomores, and moments later Stiles had caught up with them. He pushed his way into their faces and put an arm around each of them. "Up for a little adventure?" he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

Grace raised an eyebrow and stared at the two documents her brother continued to carry. It slowly dawned on her that it clearly had something to do with Theo Raeken again. "What are you going to do?" asked Liam.

"We're going to find out why Theo returned to Beacon Hills," Stiles announced, grinding his jaw. "He's got some dirt on him! The signature is a classic case of criminal tremor!"

Wildly, he waved the two documents around and handed them to Liam. "Somebody is not somebody, and we're going to get to the bottom of this now!"

"What is criminal tremor?" he asked, skimming the two documents. His eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he did so. Stiles seemed pleased that Liam was interested. The fact that he asked them both for help showed Grace that his other friends seemed to think as much of his theories as she did. Although... did she? Sure, Stiles was getting pretty into it, but maybe there was actually something to it. "People often tremble when they commit crimes," her brother finally explained.

"Today is what feels like my only day off," Grace grumbled as they stepped through the door into the fresh air. The sun dazzled her and warmed her bare arms, as well as her face, which she turned up greedily. The weather at the end of September was still very summer-like, even in northern California, which is why she really wanted to enjoy the day, if only she didn't have to sell popcorn all afternoon.

But Stiles wasn't going to be put off that easily. He wiggled both eyebrows as he made them his offer. "And before that, I'll buy you both an ice cream from Dairy Queen, what do you think?"

"Fine, but I want onion rings too."