Element of Surprise ~Stiles Stilinski Fanfic

Chapter 1

            I stared out the window watching the trees rush by in a blur or brown and greens. The car smelled of an odd mixture of fast food and the car air freshener. We had been on road for the past three days, stopping at random motels for a few hours to sleep.

My Aunt Maggie was on the phone with the manager of the nursery back in Maryland asking how things were going. I had asked her how she was going to keep a nursery open and live on the other side of the country and her answer was that she trusted her staff. Even still it hadn't stopped her from calling every day since she had promoted her assistant manager a month ago. Reaching over I turned the radio off so that she would be able to hear a little better. As I looked back out the window, I saw the road sign welcoming us to Beacon Hills. I hadn't been back here since I was eight years old and I had honestly never thought I would come back.

It had been a complete shock when Maggie said she wanted to open a new Nursery and of all the places in the entire country she thought here would be the best place. Apparently, she had been thinking about bringing me back here for a while and now just seemed like the right time. As far as I was concerned Beacon Hill could fall off the face of the planet and I wouldn't care, though it was that anger that made Maggie think that I needed this.

The car made a left turn bringing us onto a familiar road. Looking down into the deep ditch the image of a green 2000 Chevy Suburban flashed across my vision. It's wheels spinning in the air as smoke and flames spilled from the open windows. My heart began to race and my chest became tight. Squeezing my eyes tight I forced the memory from my mind as I reached down with shaky hands into my bag and pulled out a skinny blue bottle and pulled one of the clear capsules filled with brown and green herbs, popping it into my mouth.

"I thought you had stopped taking those." Maggie sighed, watching me from the corner of her eye.

"That was when we were in Maryland." I said, taking a sip of water. "This isn't Maryland."

"Bri...I just don't want you dependent on those like you use to be. You've been so good about cont-."

"Right now, I'm just worried about not breaking down." I cut in.

"I know." She reached over and grabbed my arm, giving it a light squeeze. "I know just please. Promise you'll only take them when you really need them."

Squeezing her hand back a gave her a small smile before turning the radio up. If I didn't say anything then it wasn't technically lying. Besides Maggie and I had never really agreed on when the pills were necessary and when it wasn't. Within fifteen I closed my eyes and rested my head against the seat feeling drained. The pills had begun to take effect. I was still upset and angry but it was nowhere near as intense it had been.

For someone like me intense emotions were a danger and while I had been able to learn control over most things intense anger or fear weren't things, I had ever been able to get a handle on and because of that whenever I had become angry, I would become scared making everything twice as bad. The tiredness would wear off within the hour but the side effects would last a good five hours before I would have to take any more.

When we pulled up to the house, I sat there for a good ten minutes taking deep calming breaths before finally opening the door and looking up at the house. My house. The house I had lived in with my dad and mom and my twin brother Beckett before accident. Maggie had been using it as a rental property while we lived in her house. Now it was the exact opposite we would be living here while some stranger lived in the house, I had called home for the last eight years.

Walking into the house and looked around. Over the last month Maggie had been flying back and forth trying to get everything set up for us while I stayed with my best friend Kayla. Memories came flooding back and I had to sit down. Memories of my mom sitting at the bay window, strumming her guitar, trying to learn a song to teach her preschoolers. Dad standing in the kitchen on Sunday mornings making pancakes before church. Beckett and I trying to see how far up the stairs we could jump from and still land on our feet, only to get fussed at by whichever parent caught us.

"Bridget." Maggie knelt down in front of me and wrapped her arms around me. I hadn't even realized I was crying until they began to pull on her shoulder. "This is going to be good for us. I promise."

That night we ordered pizza while we organized the rooms to our liking. I was in Beckett and I's old room. While there were three bedrooms Beckett and I would always fight over this one. It was large with a loft area for the bed. When we were younger Beckett had won the coin toss and had been able to put his bed up there but that meant I got to pick how the sitting area looked. Thankfully for him I had been much more of a tomboy so it wasn't filled with bright pinks. We had been told we could share the room until middle school but it turned out we didn't need that limit.

I stared up at the ceiling unable to sleep unable to sleep. I had moved from my bed to the couch in my sitting area. When that did nothing, I moved downstairs to the living room. Nothing worked. Getting up I wrote a quick note on the whiteboard that was hung on the fridge, grabbed my keys and walked outside, locking the door behind me.

The moon, while not quite full was big and bright enough to cast everything in a slivery glow. When we were little Me, Beckett, and our friends would sometimes go walking through the woods that was beside our house. I walked down as far as I could until the path disappeared, overgrown from years and years of unuse.

I continued deeper into the woods, running my hand over the trees I passed. I was just about to turn around when I heard an odd noise. Almost like a growl but not quiet as animalistic. As carefully and as quietly as I could I made my way towards the noise. There was a scream like someone in pain and then a man began to talk.

Ducking behind a bush I pushed the leaves apart so that I could see. A man was strung up by his hands thrashing around and saying something that I couldn't hear to a group of men that surrounded him. I reached for my phone to call the cops only to remember that I was in my pajama pants and hadn't thought to bring my phone. I cursed myself for sneaking another pill at dinner. I had been worried about having nightmares and what might come from that but had I not taken one I might have been able to help the poor man.

Putting my hand against the dirt I tried to push through the block that the pills had on me. I reached out with my mind to try and find the tree the man was hanging from. I could feel it deep under the earth. I tried to pushed against the tree, willing the branch to snap or move, something to get him away from the men under him but nothing more than a small shudder of the smaller limbs.

Looking back up I saw the older man pull something long and shiny out of a cloth that another man had brought him. The moon glinted off the sword and I felt everything around me grow cold. They were going to kill him. Were they going to stab him and let him bleed out? I watched in petrified silence as the man reared back, the blade before slicing it through the man like it was nothing.

Blood and entrails fell onto the ground, soaking into the dirt under him. Most of the men around the older gentleman seemed unphased by what had just taken place. All except for one man, the one the now dead man had first talked to. Instead of horrified by what had happened he seemed angry.

"We kill them all." The older man shouted to the group around him as he shoved the sword into the ground.

Not with that you won't I thought to myself as I placed my hand back on the ground. I closed my eyes, focusing on trying to find the cold hard metal out of placed in the soft earth. When I kept a hold of it. If I focused long and hard enough, I could push through the grip that the pills had on my powers.

The men pulled the body down and began to bury him but I couldn't focus on that. I couldn't focus on the two men arguing about some kind of code or how the others called the poor man a monster. All I could do was focus on breaking through. It had to have been a solid twenty minutes later when I my hands began to shake notifying me that the pills were wearing off.

I felt a surge flow through my arm and towards the sword. There were a few shocked cries as the earth shook slightly before the sword dipped further into the ground. Deeper and deeper, it went until the hilt was buried several feet under the surface. I couldn't help but smile at their surprise as the older man questioned what had happened. One man commented that it must have been an earthquake and most seemed to be fine with that answer since it was the only logical one there was.

Carefully I crawled backwards until I was far enough away that they wouldn't see me when I got up and ran back to the safety of the house. Once inside I rushed up the stairs and jumped into the shower to get the dirt off me. When I finally crawled back into bed it was three in the morning. I started school tomorrow and with only three to four hours of sleep under my belt it was going to be a bitch.