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Theo gets into work at 8:40 A.M., drinks exactly one cup of coffee and loses exactly one pen, and by 8:57 A.M. finds himself bent backwards over his desk and staring up at the station’s honestly very underwhelming ceiling as he says, “You know, I could see how the situation could have been misunderstood.”

He says it very carefully, given how closely the Fae Queen’s claws are to his carotid arteries, and winces when her only response is to snarl at him. Dotted around the station, Tracy is facing down the Fae King with her gun held out, her hands admirably steady considering that she knows for a fact—as does everyone else present—that it provides her exactly zero advantages. Josh for his part is frozen halfway into and halfway out of his chair, his cup of coffee halfway to his mouth as he stares at the palm full of fire that the King’s emissary is holding six inches away from his face. Corey has his hands up, the case file he’d been looking at prior to the King’s entourage bursting into the office leaking papers all over the floor, a katana held to his neck by the King’s War Chief, and the rest of the officers of Supernatural Division have wisely already surrendered; Theo finds himself thinking that he’s going to have to recommend literally every one of them for a raise.

“Where is he?” King Scott snarls, and Theo has to brace himself against the wave of absolute mental force that bears down on him, his lizard brain shrieking submit on an incredibly irritating, high-pitched mental loop.

Theo gives the ceiling a dry look and thinks that he could have been an accountant, or a librarian or the guy on the corner next to the coffee shop on Theo’s way into work that pretends to perform magic tricks but really just pickpockets unsuspecting tourists, and instead he’s here, being threatened with grievous bodily harm for having the gall to do his job. Last night when he’d been bringing the Fae Prince in, Greenberg in booking had whistled incredulously and shaken his head, all but tutting at Theo and clearly judging his life’s choices, while Theo had ignored him and had instead loudly read Prince Liam his rights under the Inter-Species Law and Peace Treaty of 1837. Even once he’d thrown Liam in a holding cell, Theo’d had to come back to his desk and endure the boggled-eyed, gap-mouthed stares of everyone who’d come into the station between then and when Theo’s shift had finally ended, and he could get the hell out of Dodge.

And now, this morning: Theo staring up at the ceiling with Queen Malia’s claws around his throat and the entire Supernatural Division being held hostage. Sighing—and then immediately regretting it, Malia’s claws scraping the skin of his neck—Theo resigns himself to getting hauled before the Council—again—some time in the near future and answers, “He is in holding, where I put him last night, for murder.”

From across the station and in another room, Liam suddenly yells, “Like I told you last night, it wasn’t murder!”

Goddamn werewolves, Theo thinks, not for the first time, and then he tells the ceiling, “According to the nine witnesses who saw you rip that man’s throat out, it definitely was.”

There’s a loud, frustrated snarl and a ringing clang like Liam had just slammed his hands against the iron bars of the holding cell. Theo winces; unlike Scott and Malia, and probably War Chief Kira, he can’t hear the sizzle of burned flesh, but he can imagine it.

“Donovan wasn’t human!” Liam shouts back, which is the same thing he’d shouted at Theo repeatedly while Theo had been arresting him and Theo had been bemoaning the state of mental health services in the county to the crowd of terrified-yet-salaciously-interested bystanders.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Theo counters exasperatedly, which is exactly what Theo had repeatedly shouted at Liam in the cruiser ride back to the station last night, to absolutely zero end; Liam had just kicked the iron mesh dividing the front and back seats and espoused a number of vitriolic opinions on Theo’s ancestry.

“Maybe the situation has been misunderstood,” Scott suddenly cuts in, and now he sounds a little amused, of all things, which is maybe worse than righteously furious.

“Great,” Theo says, now glaring at the ceiling. “Glad we could all agree.”

---

Theo brings Liam into one of the station’s main conference rooms and handcuffs him to the table, which has the benefit of being an ugly oak monstrosity of a thing and is more conveniently bolted to the floor; it’s not that Liam wouldn’t be able to break loose of it, it’s that it’d probably be more annoying for him to try than for him to just wait for Theo to uncuff him. The construction of it means that Liam ends up awkwardly contorted in his chair, since the support struts are all further back from the edge, and the look he gives Theo after Theo’s clicked the cuff closed and stepped back is viciously unimpressed. Theo just ignores him, and turns back to the rest of the room.

“Your Majesty—” He starts, ignoring the scrunched look on Scott’s face that strongly suggests he’s not sure whether he’s allowed to laugh at the picture Liam makes, given that he’s also still clearly furious about Theo having arrested Liam in the first place, but Scott cuts him off.

“Scott, Agent Raeken. It’s just Scott,” He says, exasperated because he and Theo have this argument literally every time they meet. Malia just meets Theo’s eyes and raises an eyebrow pointedly, which Theo recognizes as a dare to try and call her by her proper title; Theo’s mostly avoided that Catch-22 by staying as far out of her way as he could since he joined the force.

“Your Majesty,” Theo repeats, and continues ignoring both the way that Scott glares at him and the way that Scott’s emissary Stiles cackles and kicks a foot against the back of Scott’s chair, crowing Your Majesty with a gleeful expression. Leaned up against the wall, Kira grins. “The Prince killed a human last night.”

“No, I didn’t,” Liam counters exasperatedly, attempting to straighten and getting drawn up short by the cuff still attaching him to the bottom side of the table. He turns to glare accusingly at Theo, who glares unrepentantly back. “Donovan wasn’t human.”

“According to our records he was,” Theo tells him pointedly, unable to resist engaging even though he and Liam have had variations on this conversation several times already.

“Fine,” Liam snaps, “Then he wasn’t human anymore, not last night.”

“When you killed him,” Theo finishes for him, and doesn’t acknowledge Liam throwing his uncuffed hand up in the air and miming strangling Theo with it.

“He was a revenant!” Liam yells, which is also the single useful thing he’d ended up yelling the night before.

Only it hadn’t actually been that useful, because when Theo had poked his head out of the holding cell area to yell at Corey—who’d jumped and nearly dumped his cup of coffee down his shirt—Corey had yelled back that there were no known active liches in their area. Liam had been unimpressed with this revelation, and had shrieked I never said there was! through the holding cell bars at Theo’s crossed arms and raised eyebrows, and that had been about the time that Theo had given up on having a productive conversation with him and had gone back to his desk to be silently judged for three hours before he could go home.

“Except that there’s no lich,” Theo reminds him, and honestly only remembers the other members of the Fae court in the room when Scott gently clears his throat.

“Maybe if we started closer to the beginning,” He offers.

An hour later, and Theo is sat in a chair and face-down on the table, hands clenched in his already severely disheveled hair and listening to Tracy, bless her, trying to dutifully ask clarifying questions about how the Fae Kingdom had just entirely neglected to mention the centuries-old Fae serial killers running loose at any point during the preceding one hundred and eighty-two years of the Fae-Human alliance.

“They’re not serial killers, Raeken, jesus,” Liam says, but since he’d given up on sitting in his chair to lie on his back on the floor, his cuffed hand dangling awkwardly in the air from where it’s still attached to the table, Theo is refusing to listen to him on principle.

“They’re kind of serial killers,” Lydia—the King’s Spy Chief—opines, at the same time that Stiles points out, “They do kill people in recurring and distinctly ritualized patterns, which does technically make them serial killers.”

Theo would feel more vindicated if he wasn’t currently blaming Stiles’ father—the former head of Supernatural Division, and the person who’d recruited a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and incredibly naive Theo into the profession in the first place—for the current mess he’s in. He’s also blaming Lydia, but that has more to do with the fact that she’d swanned into the station precisely fifteen minutes after the hostage situation had ended as anticlimactically as possible, and had responded to Theo’s series of pissed-off gestures with a calm, “I didn’t stop him because he didn’t bother to ask me first, Raeken,” before proceeding to take over both his conference room and Scott’s explanation of the Dread Doctors with admirable aplomb.

“Serial killers,” Theo repeats doggedly, and also without raising his head. “Which you didn’t tell us about.”

“It wasn’t exactly my choice, Agent Raeken,” Scott answers, putting a particularly prissy emphasis on Theo’s title in petty revenge since Theo is still refusing to call him Scott. “Not to mention that they haven’t been active in over fifty years.”

Both Theo and Tracy perk up at that. “What happened last time they were active?” Tracy asks, pen already hovering over her notebook.

“Unclear,” Stiles answers, and smiles winningly when Theo raises his head—finally—to glare at him.

“Well, why’d they stop?” Theo presses, switching his glare from Stiles to Scott.

“We don’t know,” Scott answers, but he at least sounds apologetic.

Theo chooses to interpret his contrition as applying both to how utterly useless he and his court have been to this turn in the conversation, and to the fact that the entire Fae Kingdom have apparently been hiding a trio of alarmingly effective serial killers under their collective skirts for at least two centuries. Frowning thoughtfully, he turns to look at Tracy, who turns and frowns thoughtfully back.

“Who would know?” Tracy finally asks, turning back to Scott and the others.

And, honestly, it may make him a bad person, but seeing Scott’s expression go pained, while down the table Lydia just looks unbelievably smug, just instantly makes Theo’s day better.

---

“Allison Argent?” Theo double-checks, awkwardly leaned over onto his stomach over the middle seats of Scott’s hilariously practical, suburban-soccer-parent crossover as he fights to unlock Liam’s cuffs, Liam doing absolutely nothing to make the process easier.

(“Sorry, Agent Raeken,” The coroner had told him, Theo staring resignedly out of the windshield with his phone pressed to his ear and doing his best to ignore Liam smirking obnoxiously at him in the rearview mirror from the back seat. “Looks like the Prince was right, and Donovan was already dead. Weird, right?”

“Weird,” Theo had agreed from between gritted teeth, eyes flicking reflexively to the mirror as Liam had held up his still-cuffed hands pointedly and raised his eyebrows in perfectly obvious challenge.)

Theo finally overcomes the poor physics of the situation and Liam’s general, mean-spirited malaise, and manages to get the cuffs open as he finishes, “As in Council Members Kate and Gerard Argent?”

“The very same,” Stiles answers absently from the front seat, on his phone and muttering god damn Hales every few minutes, so Theo assumes he’s arguing with one or both of the surviving Hale siblings for whatever reason.

Theo concentrates on very carefully turning around in his seat and replacing his cuffs in his jacket pocket as he tries to figure out how to phrase his next question, which is but don’t the Argents hate you all? Theo is more familiar with the Argents than he’d like to be, partially because they’re one of the oldest Fae-aware human families in history and practically royalty themselves because of it, and partially because a good three-quarters of the Supernatural Division’s knowledge base on Fae—not to mention humanity’s at large—is based on their extensive and at-times disturbingly thorough historical archives; Theo’s had to turn to one or the other Argent as consultants on cases more times than he can count. But primarily he’s more familiar with the Argents than he’d like, because, well.

Theo follows Council politics not because he finds them particularly enjoyable—the process is about as much fun as a continuous, ongoing root canal—but because a not-insignificant part of his job is managing all of the politicians on one side or the other who think the latest Supernatural Division case is a sign of the oft-predicted and never-seemingly-materializing Fae-human war. And that—that’s why he knows that the only way for the Argents to be any further on the pro-human side of the aisle would be if that side of the building stretched into the next county.

“Allison’s not like that,” Scott insists, apparently reading Theo’s mind.

“Allison’s not like that anymore,” Stiles corrects, coming up for air from his phone in time to shoot Scott a pointed look. “She had a few brainwashed-by-grandpa years.”

“Yeah, right in the middle of Scott’s and Allison’s Romeo-and-Juliet reenactment,” Liam mutters, and then yelps—Theo ducking at the last second—as Scott turns around at a red light to pelt Liam in the forehead with the empty paper coffee cup that’d been in his cup-holder. “Ow, fuck!”

They make it to Allison’s house—a deceptively Better Homes and Gardens affair with a wraparound porch and a crushed gravel driveway—at the edge of town with minimal further incident, though Theo winds up wedging himself as far into the corner of the middle row of seats as he can to avoid further shrapnel damage as Scott and Liam argue back and forth about the exact nature of Scott’s and Allison’s former relationship. Stiles spends the rest of the ride goading one or both of them on, in between peppering Theo with questions about Supernatural Division cases (“I can’t tell you that,” Theo just keeps replying, narrowly avoiding getting smacked in the back of the head with a stuffed animal that Liam had found somewhere) and insulting Theo’s general work ethic, intelligence, and strategic thinking skills (“I thought he was a murderer, you asshole!” Theo gives up and shouts just as Scott finally parks; Stiles smirks).

Malia’s car is already in the driveway and empty, which means that Tracy has probably already third-degreed Allison into giving her all the information they need, and Theo just suffered that car ride for precisely no reason. Sighing, Theo undoes his seatbelt and follows Scott and Stiles out of the car, and has just started to turn around to fold the seat down to let Liam out of the back when Liam scrambles smoothly over the seats instead, and slides out between Theo and the still-open car door. He swivels on a heel as Theo turns to glare at him, and spreads his now-uncuffed hands wide as he walks backwards towards the house, a shit-eating grin on his face; Theo works his jaw, and then pushes Scott’s car door back shut.

The woman who opens the front door for them has her pulled messily back from a spectacularly unimpressed expression, one hand wrapped around a mug and her other hand braced on the wood of the door, both attached to arms that honestly wouldn’t look out of place on a marble statue of one of the Greek goddesses of the hunt. Archer, Theo’s mind pulls up as Allison’s eyes flick over their assembled group before settling on Scott, her eyebrows climbing.

“Taking over a police station, huh, Your Majesty?” She says dryly, managing to both use Scott’s title and to put a particular emphasis on it that has Scott flushing hotly.

“There was a misunderstanding,” Scott mutters, scratching the back of his neck, and Allison’s expression softens.

“Isn’t there always,” She murmurs, and something flashes across her face, quick enough to almost be invisible as she turns to let them into the house. But Theo is a professional goddamned criminal investigator, and that something was regret. Huh, he thinks, as he follows Scott and Stiles and Liam into Allison’s foyer.

Allison leads them to a cozy dining area set off from a spacious kitchen, Lydia curled up in a chair at a large, roughened-wood dining table with her laptop open in front of her; Allison sets the mug in her hand down beside Lydia’s computer and presses a kiss to the top of Lydia’s head, then slides into the chair next to hers. A few feet away from her, Malia is stood by a blank stretch of wall—Theo absently notes the framed picture now propped out of the way against the house’s sliding glass door onto the back porch—though it’s becoming less blank by the second; an arm pops up over the edge of the opposite side of the table and hands Malia a post-it note the approximate color of a radiation spill, Malia taking it and adding it to its fellows on the wall.

Eyebrows climbing, Theo leans forward a little so that he can see Tracy, sat cross-legged on the floor by Malia’s feet and surrounded by a veritable nest of papers. “Hey, Theo!” She chirps when she sees him, though she immediately drops her head back down to finish scribbling another note before she peels it off its pad and hands it to Malia, too.

“What’s all this?” Theo asks curiously, rounding the table so that he can crouch down next to Tracy; behind him Stiles bellows I need caffeine and then blows a dismissive raspberry when Liam yells at him to get him a cup, too.

“Where’s Kira?” Scott asks over the sound of Stiles and Liam still arguing as he pulls out his own chair at the table and drops into it.

“Derek called,” Malia answers, carefully accepting another note from Tracy and then frowning as she studies the growing sprawl of them on the wall, apparently trying to find the right place to put it. “Apparently Ennis and Kali were spotted along the Preserve’s southern border.”

Theo looks up at that, turning to look at Scott in time to see Scott sigh and drop his head into his hands, his elbows braced on the table. “Great, that’s just what we need right now.”

Lydia must catch Theo looking because she murmurs, low and not a little wry, “Not your problem, Agent Raeken.”

“Your problems seem to have a habit of becoming my problems, Chief Martin,” Theo counters, not a little pointedly; Lydia levels him a considering look and then smirks and returns her attention to her laptop.

“Hey,” Tracy says quietly, pulling his attention away from Lydia and now Stiles returning from Allison’s kitchen with a collection of mugs threaded through his fingers by their handles and an entire pot of coffee. “Look at this.”

Theo looks where she’s indicating, and sees that her nest of papers is actually relatively neat; the documents are divided into five stacks, the tint to the papers getting progressively more yellowed with age as Tracy points from one to the next, the text going from typed to typewritten to handwritten. There are pictures, too: fully colored photos obviously cribbed from social media sites at one end, and the black-and-white, slightly metallic sheen of old Victorian flash photography at the other. Theo sucks in a breath as he realizes what it means.

“Holy shit,” He breathes, and goes down on his knees so that he can reach for the newest of the stacks, pull it towards himself as he starts flipping through it. The picture of Donovan he recognizes, but there are three others he doesn’t, two men and one woman, all of them smiling guilelessly out from their photos; Theo swallows.

“I looked them up,” Tracy tells him quietly. “All three are listed as missing persons, according to the Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department records. Deputy Romero has all three cases.”

Theo sighs and rubs tired fingers over his forehead, holds up the files towards Scott and the others all sat around the table. “I assume they were revenants, too?”

Scott nods regretfully. “We can transfer the bodies to Supernatural Division, now, given…” He trails off, but Theo viciously fills in the silence with now that we’ve decided to come clean about the mass-murderers running around. “Will that let you help BHSD close the cases, bring their—their families some closure?”

Tracy replies yes, quiet and gentle, but Theo drops his attention back down to the other stacks of documents—the other thick stacks of documents, pictures of victims staring sightlessly up at the incongruously bright ceilings of Allison’s home—and feels his teeth clench. “How could you not tell Supernatural Division about this? How could you not tell the Council?”

“Oh, spare us the wounded drama, Agent Raeken,” Stiles snorts, meeting Theo’s eyes levelly when Theo turns to glare at him. “You’re not that naive.”

Theo goes to open his mouth to respond but it’s Allison, surprisingly, who beats him to it. “What do you think the Council would have done if they found out there was a group of Fae killers targeting humans? What do you think the Council of fifty years ago would have done?” She asks him gently.

Theo feels his jaw clench as some of his righteous indignation fades, because he’d been the one to think, not even an hour ago—wedged into a corner in Scott’s ridiculous car and amused despite himself as he watched Scott and Stiles and Liam clown around—about every smarmy Council member who’s ever cornered him at a Supernatural Division fundraiser to joke about Fae-human hostilities breaking out, all of them, all of them, unable to keep the hungry glint from their eyes.

Dropping his gaze back down to the files, Theo reaches out and drags another stack closer to himself, stares down at the man in the military photo—clearly WWI-era—staring up at him. “We have an alliance,” Theo insists, quietly and almost to himself.

“We have an alliance now,” Stiles disagrees, and his expression when Theo looks back up at him is hard. “Back then, it was, at best, a truce.”

“My great-grandfather was on the Council back then.” Allison offers into the following stilted silence, and her quirked smile when Theo glances over at her is both sympathetic and immovable. “I have his journals. You can read them, if you like.”

Theo holds her gaze for a second and then drops his own, his shoulders slumping as he sighs and responds, “No need,” with no further elaboration. Tracy studies him for a second and then bumps her shoulder against his, pausing to lean more strongly against him for a beat when he gives her a weak smile. “You had those post-it notes in your bag already, didn’t you?” He teases.

His tone is still a little off but Tracy takes it for the invitation—the request—that it is and punches him lightly in the arm, and then she scrambles to her feet to approach hers and Malia’s collage of post-its as she says, a little breathlessly, “Okay, here’s what I’ve gathered so far—”

Theo half-listens to her talk, his stomach still an unsettled mess as he tries, and only mostly succeeds, in not looking down at the files upon files of the Dread Doctors’ victims in front of him. Then he jumps, his attention pulled away from Tracy to Liam as Liam gently prods him in the shoulder with a knee. Theo looks up at him, brow furrowing as he catches sight of the cup of coffee that Liam is holding out.

“Think of it this way,” Liam tells him, quietly enough that he won’t interrupt Tracy’s flow, “Now you get to help catch the bastards.”

Theo studies him for a beat, a little taken aback, and then he reaches forward and accepts the mug. “And all because you decided to murder a revenant in broad daylight,” He replies, and hides the small, quirked curve to his lips by taking a drink.

Liam’s expression starts to twist with indignation, at least until he looks down to glare at Theo and apparently catches Theo’s smile instead. Liam’s lips twitch, and he glances away, lips pulled between his teeth in an obvious effort to bite down on his own smile.

“Yeah, well.” He says, and looks back at Theo, his eyes crinkled up at the corners. “You can thank me later.”

---

It’s late enough by the time Scott runs Theo and Tracy back to the station that most of the cars in the parking lot have turned over; a new shift coming on. Tracy practically rockets out of the car and into the building, already beyond late for a dinner with her father and all but leaving speedlines behind her as she goes. Theo just grins and undoes his seatbelt, hops out of the car with a quick nod of thanks to Scott. His phone buzzes in his pocket as he starts walking to his station, and he’s absorbed enough in scrolling through his mostly ignored email about the station’s latest Supermoon Serum drug bust—Theo doesn’t get it; who the hell would want to voluntarily dose themselves with a drug that imitates the effect of the full moon on werewolves?—that he initially misses Scott following him out of the car.

“Agent Raeken!” Scott calls, and Theo looks up and back around at him, pausing in the middle of the sidewalk up to the station’s entrance. Scott finishes jogging up to him and then stops, biting his lip and twisting his hands together in an uncharacteristic show of hesitation. “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” He suddenly blurts out, then clarifies at Theo’s blank look: “For this morning, for the—”

“Relatively benign hostile takeover?” Theo offers, and smiles when he says it, both to remove whatever sting from his words that there may have been and because he—surprising both himself and, clearly, Scott—genuinely means it.

Scott studies him for a second longer and then huffs a self-deprecating laugh. “Yeah, that.” But then the smile falls off his face and his eyes go distant, the line of his mouth hardening as he clearly thinks about something Theo has no context for, or insight into. “Look,” He finally says, exhaling roughly and turning back to Theo, “It must have seemed like a—a massive overreaction, or something—”

Theo says nothing, because massive overreaction hadn’t even begun to cover his confusion when Scott and Malia and the other members of the Fae Court had burst into the station, flare-eyed and fang-mouthed and with the full extent of their otherworldliness on full display. The whole thing had ended so abruptly and anticlimactically—and the reality of the job was just, well, the job—that everyone present had all but shrugged it off by the time Theo had been dragging a smug and still-mouthy Liam from the holding cells to the conference room, but that didn’t mean that Theo had stopped wondering.

“—but we couldn’t sense him.” Scott finishes, his eyes searching Theo’s face, clearly checking to see if Theo is understanding what Scott is trying to tell him.

Theo stares at him, taken aback. Popular media had taken the idea of werewolves and run in some pretty strange directions with it, but one thing that most depictions—horrible, disturbingly twee, and otherwise—had absolutely nailed was the pack bond. As Liam’s alpha—and the Fae King of the area—Scott should have been able to sense Liam from across the goddamn country, let alone across town.

“The cuffs, maybe?” Theo hazards, mind working. “Or the bars of the holding cell? They both contain synthetically strengthened iron compounds.”

Theo knows it’s bullshit even as he’s saying it, but Scott graciously doesn’t point that out and just shakes his head, like Theo’s said something reasonable instead of completely asinine. “No, there’s no way. Remember when Cora got arrested for that fight with Deucalion’s pack?” Theo grimaces, because there’s no way he could forget having to break up and then arrest a bar full of enraged werewolves. “We could sense her no problem.”

“And half our equipment is Fae-designed,” Theo mutters, granting Scott the point. “So what the hell do you think happened?”

This time when Scott’s jaw works, it works. Theo’s eyes narrow as he studies him, interest—and law enforcement instincts—now fully piqued.

“We thought you’d given him to the Hunters.” Scott admits, finally, sounding an odd mix of hesitant and stony.

Theo’s eyebrows shoot up and he very nearly takes a step back from Scott, stunned. “The Hunters?” He hisses, and at least has the benefit of seeing Scott’s face twist with embarrassment. “Jesus christ, Your Majesty.”

“Scott, Agent Raeken, for god’s sa—” Scott starts to say, reflexively, before he abruptly cuts himself off. He rakes his hands back through his hair, then explains, his words clipped and staccato, “It was the only explanation we could come up with that made any sense. If you’d given him to the Hun—”

“Without a trial?” Theo snaps, interrupting Scott and, miraculously, feeling only slightly terrified after he’s done it. “Or, hell, even a full investigation?”

“He was gone!” Scott all but shouts, and for the first time Theo really sees his distress, writ raw across his face and his stiff, jerky movements. “He’d been tracking the Dread Doctors and stumbled across Donovan, and we were sensing him fine until suddenly he just disappeared.”

“Why didn’t you think he was dead, then?” Theo asks before he can stop himself, his mind clicking over into interrogation without his conscious permission.

Scott snaps his teeth—which have a little more point to them than usual—together and glares at Theo, his eyes a little more burgundy than brown as he stares Theo down. “Originally we did,” He answers, clipped, and Theo’s own expression twists with regret. “But then we were told that you’d arrested him.”

Told by one of Theo’s own people, no doubt. Theo had made his peace with the fact that Supernatural Division had always been and would always be infested with Fae spies—Lydia tended to get this particularly smug, cat-with-the-canary look on her face every time she and Theo talked—but that didn’t mean it didn’t still annoy him. Setting his irritation very firmly aside, Theo forces himself to meet and hold Scott’s eyes.

“I would never hand one of your people over to the Hunters without having all the information first, and I would never let any of my people do so, either.” Theo tells him, and he hadn’t necessarily meant for it to be an oath of sorts, but that’s what it winds up being; Scott’s expression blanks some with surprise.

“I know that,” He says after a second, quiet and with absolutely no hesitation. Then he sighs and scrubs his hands over his face before burying them in his hair and leaving them there, white-knuckled and straining. “I panicked,” He admits. “Liam was—”

“—your first beta,” Theo fills in quietly, and quirks Scott a small smile when Scott looks at him. “I didn’t sleep through all of my History of Local Fae Society classes at the academy.”

Scott quirks him an equally small smile, but it’s also exhausted. “I’m sorry,” He repeats, firmly. “I’ll meet with Captain Finstock tomorrow, explain everything. The relatively benign hostile takeover—” His smile turns, briefly, into a grin—Theo’s doing the same—before it sobers again, “—the Dread Doctors, all of it.”

He stands looking at Theo once he’s done, clearly expecting some kind of agreement. But Theo—there’s a small, squirming thing in his gut, an insistent twist of instinct, and instead he finds himself saying, “Don’t.”

Scott looks at him in blatant surprise. “What?”

“I’ll take care of Finstock and—and whoever,” Theo tells him, his voice getting stronger and more certain as he talks, “I’ll come up with…an explanation, something. It’s Finstock. No one died and he still has enough players to beat San Diego’s Supernatural Division in the charity lacrosse game next month, he’ll be fine.”

Scott’s expression is hilariously conflicted as he both grins helplessly at Theo’s description of Finstock—because Theo is one hundred percent correct and they both know it—and his eyebrows attempt to rise. “And the Council?” He points out, not unreasonably.

“I’ll take care of it,” Theo repeats, firmly.

Scott studies him for a long few seconds, but Theo can see his same suspicion there, that niggling, insistent feeling of something’s not right. After a second he starts to nod, slowly at first but then more quickly until he stops: agreement made.

“Thank you,” Scott says, low and sincerely.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Theo tells him, and meets Scott’s steady gaze. “We still have to catch the bastards.”

---

Theo heads into the station fully intending to gather up his shit and go collapse into bed, since this day has officially been the most exhausting he’s had in a number of new and exciting ways, but he can’t, because there’s a tall blonde woman lounging idly back against his desk—the rest of the officers giving her both furtive looks and a wide berth—and she straightens up when she sees him.

“Agent Raeken,” She greets, somehow managing to sound both smooth and insinuating all at the same time.

“Councilwoman Argent,” Theo replies carefully, slowing on his approach to his desk and looking around the station like the answer to why Kate Argent had apparently been lying in wait for him might be hidden in the mass chaos that is Josh’s desk, or in the corner by the eternally-broken water cooler.

Kate apparently senses his hesitation because she smirks, close-mouthed and sly and with her sharp eyes on his face. “I heard you arrested the Fae Prince last night.”

That’s an opening if Theo’s ever heard one, but Theo just feels his jaw work as he comes to a stop a respectful distance away and then leans around Kate to toss his jacket over the back of his desk chair.

(“Wait,” Theo had said, pausing with his chopsticks halfway to his mouth as he’d stared over the counter in Allison’s kitchen overlooking the dining area at Scott, Liam, Tracy and the others all trading cartoons of Chinese around. It had been late enough into their research binge that Theo had felt like an absolute embarrassment to his profession for only realizing it at the time, but: “If you know about all this—” He’d started, waving the orange beef clutched between his chopsticks around at Tracy’s post-it note collage and the files spread haphazardly over the table, his eyes on Allison, “—then doesn’t that mean…?”

“...so do the rest of the Argents?” Allison had finished for him, her mouth going hard; Theo had felt his own expression tighten, but it was Stiles who’d answered.

“They can’t inform the Council, or anyone else,” Stiles had replied, with a particularly nasty tone to his voice, “because if they did, they’d have to admit to lynching an innocent pack of werewolves that the Argent ancestors and their cronies had convinced themselves were responsible for the Dread Doctors’ killings a few decades ago.”

“Oh,” Theo had said, lamely, into the resulting loaded silence, and then for lack of any better ideas had stuffed the now-lukewarm orange beef on the end of his chopsticks into his mouth.)

But Theo can’t just stand in stony silence three feet away from one of the most powerful members of the Council forever, so finally he sucks in a deep breath—more than aware of the way Kate’s attention follows the rise and fall of his shoulders but unable to do much about it—and tells her, “I did indeed arrest the Fae Prince last night.” His tone is perfectly pleasant but also carefully neutral, and he gives her a thin-lipped smile that doesn’t touch his eyes as he makes to move around her towards his desk, like he’d answered her question and was prepared to move on.

Kate just takes a half-step to her left to intercept him, Theo immediately halting. Even so they’re now mere inches from each other, Kate’s loosely-crossed arms nearly brushing Theo’s chest as Theo forces himself to stand his ground, to meet her eyes.

“So where is he?” Kate insists, leaning in even closer as she asks it.

Theo doesn’t move or lean back, but it takes effort; he can feel his neck muscles go rigid. For a moment he considers claiming that the information is police business, or part of an ongoing investigation—both technically true—but he thinks better of it instantly. Instead he grits his teeth, and makes sure to keep the bland smile on his face, and says, “Released this morning. Turns out it was all a big misunderstanding.”

Kate’s eyebrows climb. “He was arrested for murder.”

God damn the station’s habit of leaking information like a goddamn sieve; Theo was going to need some kind of massage to get his neck muscles to unlock after all this. Pulling up his flagging smile, Theo replies, “He was, true. But it turns out his victim was already dead. Last I checked murdering a corpse isn’t a crime, unless you and the Council snuck something into the last criminal code update that I missed.”

“Cute,” Kate tells him, not sounding like she finds it—or him—particularly cute at all. “But I wasn’t aware there was an active lich in the area.”

“Strangely enough, neither were we,” Theo replies, and doesn’t bother to elaborate.

Kate studies him for a few seconds, her eyes narrow and hard, and then—Theo’s thoughts nearly tripping over themselves in surprise at the sudden change in her demeanor—her entire posture shakes itself loose, her expression going self-deprecating and just a little embarrassed. She takes a step back from him, out of his space, and tosses her hair a little. Theo stares at her, stunned, unsure what the hell to think beyond holy shit, she’s goddamn blushing.

And she is, this gentle, light dusting of color across her cheeks that is so entirely at odds with her previous behavior and with what Theo knows of her that Theo’s thoughts jam up, his suspicion and wariness tangling with his professional training in responding to shellshocked civilians.

“God, I’m sorry, Agent Raeken.” Kate suddenly apologizes, sounding genuinely contrite. “The last thing you must have wanted after the day you’ve had is to come back to your desk to an overly nosy, clueless Council Member.” Which is true, but. Theo just stares, and Kate smiles at him, embarrassed and easy. “It’s just, when we heard the news, my father and I—and the rest of the Council—were so concerned.”

“The news?” Theo repeats carefully, sensing a trap but unable to put his finger directly on what it might be.

For just a moment Kate’s smile goes sharp, but it softens almost immediately. “The Fae King’s takeover of the station, of course.” She tells him, sympathetic like maybe she thought the trauma of the experience had screwed with his head, and that’s why he needed to be reminded that he’d nearly had his throat ripped out by the Fae Queen less than twelve hours ago.

Theo’s jaw clenches shut. Ten minutes ago he’d told Scott he’d take care of the Council, confident and prim like some kind of asshole just daring the universe to test him on it, and now: Councilwoman Kate Argent at his desk, needing to be taken care of. But Theo was counting on having more time, and he doesn’t have a good explanation ready. The Fae King panicked because he thought I’d turned his first beta over to a bunch of thinly-veiled human supremacists masquerading as Fae correctional officers, Theo thinks, and then he says the only other thing that comes to mind.

“Also a big misunderstanding,” Theo tells her, and makes up for the absolute inanity of his claim by smiling, big and guileless and wide.

Kate’s expression blanks with surprise, like she hadn’t expected him to throw all his eggs in the bumbling officer, aw shucks basket; like maybe she’d been counting on defensiveness, or denial, or something else she could sink her teeth into. The bland, rounded edges of Theo’s idiotic response don’t leave her anything to grab ahold of—don’t present her any corners she can back him into—and from the way her mouth starts to twist and her eyes start to narrow, she knows it.

“A big misunderstanding,” She repeats neutrally, like she was maybe giving him the chance to correct himself.

“Honestly, I might have to thank the Fae King. Send him a fruit basket, or something,” Theo continues blithely, embracing the absolute absurdity of what he’s saying and just running with it as he physically moves around Kate to get to his desk, starts shuffling papers around; easy and unconcerned and one-hundred percent fine: just like the rest of the station. “This morning should be able to cover at least a year’s worth of station lockdown drills, don’t you think?”

He turns back, now leaning back against his desk, to smile at her again. Kate studies him, but she must realize that she’s not going to get anything further from him because her mouth twitches just a bit into a sneer, her own slightly airheaded, bumbling politician act falling away. She works her jaw some as she looks at him, then pastes a patently-false smile onto her face.

“I guess we should just be grateful that no one was hurt, hmm?” She says, falsely bright and playing along. “Gift horses, and all that.”

“Gift horses,” Theo agrees, and can’t help crossing his arms over his chest as a barrier no matter how much he tries to keep them down, Kate’s sharp eyes fixed unerringly on his face.

“Well, then,” Kate murmurs, her voice dropping an octave, and in such a way that has Theo’s adrenal gland sitting up and taking notice. “I suppose I’ll see you at the next Council budget meeting for the station, Argent Raeken.”

“Looking forward to it,” Theo tells her, flatter than he’d meant and with all the faux-pleasantness just evaporating from his expression, like the two of them had silently agreed to stop bullshitting the other.

Kate holds his gaze for a moment longer, and then she smirks and turns on a heel, heads for the bank of elevators. Theo normally hates the way his assigned desk puts his back directly to them but now he’s grateful for it, because sat back on the edge of the synthetic wood he can watch without trouble as the elevator doors open, as Kate steps inside and presses the button for the ground floor. She catches his eyes as she straightens back up, and the smile she gives him as the doors slide shut isn’t a smile at all.

Theo’s still sitting and staring at the closed doors a minute or so later when Josh suddenly appears at his side, his omnipresent mug of coffee in his hands as he perches his ass next to Theo’s and joins him in studying the shiny metal of the elevator doors. “Was it just me, or was that really fucking weird?” He asks after a few seconds, raising an eyebrow when Theo glances over at him.

Theo doesn’t answer right away, his jaw starting to ache from the pressure of having it clenched. “It wasn’t just you,” He answers eventually, his eyes flicking reflexively back to where Kate Argent had disappeared.

---

Theo wakes up the next morning not because his alarm is going off, but because someone is pounding loudly and insistently at his front door.

When he finally manages to stumble his way out of bed, clothes wrinkled and hair an absolute mess based on the glances he catches of himself as he makes his way blearily to the door, Liam is on the other side of it. He smirks when he sees Theo’s general dishevelment, the flash of teeth wide and bright and momentarily distracting Theo from the more immediately relevant concern.

“What are you doing here?” Theo finally manages to croak. Then something else occurs to him as he clocks the two take-out cups in Liam’s hands and his eyes narrow. “And were you kicking my door?”

Liam rolls his eyes and makes an elaborate, exaggerated demonstration of stacking one of the cups on top of the other before reaching forward to mime knocking. “No, you caveman.” He answers, and laughs at the sour look that takes over Theo’s face. “Are you going to let me in or not?”

Theo’s stepping back out of the doorway to let Liam in before he fully realizes what he’s doing. He loses a few seconds frowning at himself—long enough for Liam to slip in through the cracked-open door—before he shakes himself out of it and turns to follow Liam’s progress, shutting the door as he goes. Liam—still holding the cups, one in each hand—is shamelessly snooping around Theo’s apartment, looking at the pictures on the walls and crouching down to study some of the various items tucked carefully into bookshelves and on top of cabinets. At one point he pauses in front of a set of sharp, yellowed fangs set meticulously into a shadowbox and closes his eyes, inhaling deeply, before he turns to glance questioningly at Theo.

“Those were a gift,” Theo snaps, though the edge is softened somewhat by the sleep-roughened rasp to his voice. “I didn’t pull them out of some werecoyote’s mouth.”

Liam gives him a dry look, “Like I’d thought you did. Why would someone give you werecoyote fangs?”

“Why do witches do anything?” Theo shoots back. “I don’t know, she was a witness to a case a few years ago and she insisted I have them. Showed up at the station with them in a little bag and wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Liam’s eyebrows climb. “And you framed them?”

This line of questioning is officially making Theo uncomfortable, because he doesn’t know how to explain the sense of rightness that had stolen over him the second he’d given in to the witch’s demands and held up his palms so that she could shake the fangs into the cup his hands had made. And even if he did know how to explain all that, he’s not sure Liam would be his first choice for a confidante.

“Do I need a lawyer for this conversation?” Theo snarks instead, and feels something gone strangely tight in his chest unwind when Liam just rolls his eyes and looks away, letting it go. But that still leaves a number of other questions unanswered, not the least of which is: “Your Highness, seriously. What are you doing here?”

Liam is already shaking his head, and vigorously. “Oh, no. Hell no. You are not pulling that proper title bullshit with me. My name is Liam.”

“Except that I like my job, and want to keep it, and so I absolutely will ‘keep pulling this proper title bullshit’ with you, Your Highness, Fae Prince Dunbar,” Theo assures him, glaring at Liam when he glares at Theo. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

“Fine, whatever, Agent Raeken,” Liam replies, sounding pissy about it. As he does he shoves one of the to-go cups in his hands towards Theo, stopping it just before it would have hit Theo in the chest to explode and send coffee—because Theo can smell it now, this close—everywhere. “You said yesterday that you wanted to talk to Valack.”

The last of Theo’s sleepiness and his mostly-toothless annoyance at Liam’s unannounced invasion of his apartment gets yanked away. He brings up his hand reflexively to take the coffee Liam’s offering as he narrows his eyes, studying Liam’s face. “But I thought the King said…”

“He pulled some strings,” Liam interrupts, shrugging. He also looks away when he does it, the slightest bit of color dusting his cheeks, and Theo finds himself wondering if it was Scott who’d pulled the necessary strings at all. “It has to be today and you have to be escorted by a member of the Fae court—” Here Liam pauses to do a little jazz-hands routine, “—but Eichen grudgingly agreed you could question him.”

“Okay. Okay,” Theo mutters, mostly to himself, his free hand rising to rake through his hair and his other bringing Liam’s gifted coffee up to his mouth so that he can take an unconscious drink as his mind kicks into high gear. He jolts when it hits his tongue, though, and looks down at it, surprised.

“I watched you drink like a gallon of coffee at Allison’s yesterday,” Liam says in response, rolling his eyes again; if he doesn’t stop, Theo thinks uncharitably, his eyes are going to pop out of his head and go rolling down Theo’s dubiously polished floors like pachinko balls. “Wasn’t that hard to figure out how you take it after watching you sneak spoonfuls of sugar into your mug from Allison’s sugar jar like you were stealing precious jewels.”

“You know, even when you’re being nice, you’re still kind of an asshole,” Theo tells him thoughtfully, and the briefly enraged look on Liam’s face is absolutely worth the spike of terror—Liam is still the Fae Prince—that Theo experiences. Then Liam’s mouth twitches up into a smile and he shakes his head slightly and laughs under his breath.

Theo leaves Liam in his living room—resigning himself to the fact that Liam is one hundred percent going to use the unsupervised freedom to poke around every nook and cranny of Theo’s apartment—and goes to get ready. He’s out of the shower and dressed quickly, and then he follows Liam down to an ancient-looking SUV that looks like it’s one good rainstorm from rusting into pieces.

Liam must catch the look on his face because he makes one right back and says, “Not all of us feel the need to so visibly compensate for something.” He jerks his thumb pointedly back over his shoulder at Theo’s truck parked a few spaces away; Theo flips him off and climbs into the passenger seat of the SUV while Liam laughs.

Liam runs him by the station first, after an impassioned argument at a red light in which Theo points out that if Liam was such a stickler for schedules, maybe he should have called Theo first instead of barging into his apartment without warning.

(“How did you even know where I lived?” Theo had finally demanded, and then he’d been thrown back against the seat some as Liam had put his foot down heavily against the gas and had flipped off the person leaning on their horn behind them.

“I tracked you,” Liam had deadpanned, and then had proceeded to give a honking and not at all attractive laugh in response to the look on Theo’s face. “I called your boss and asked, you idiot.”

“Great,” Theo had replied, resigned and not particularly surprised. “Good to know Finstock’s willing to give out my address to all and sundry.”

“I’m not all and sundry,” Liam had said, with a sly little smirk that had done something complicated to Theo’s insides when Liam had aimed it at him. “Like you pointed out, I’m the Fae Prince.”)

At the station Theo quickly corrals Tracy, Josh, and Corey into a too-small room off the third floor that had, for reasons that have been lost to history, never been fully finished. In addition to lacking paint and anywhere to sit that isn’t abandoned office equipment covered in at least an inch of dust, it also lacks a connection to the majority of the protections—and other magics—weaved into and around the station. Tracy doesn’t look at all surprised when Theo shuts the door behind himself but Josh and Corey are squinting at him suspiciously.

“This has something to do with Kate Argent ambushing you last night, doesn’t it,” Josh says once the latch clicks, and it’s not a question.

Theo leaves it to Tracy to fill them fully in later, and in the meantime gives them the world’s shortest and just barely-adequate explanation of what he and Tracy had learned yesterday. That out of the way, and ignoring the alarmed faces both Josh and Corey are wearing, Theo orders Corey—whose perpetually sunny disposition tends to cause suspicion to slide off of him like oil on glass—to look into possible causes for Liam’s unexplained disappearance from the Fae court’s senses two nights ago, and he orders Josh—who’d proven himself to be one of the few Supernatural Division officers who could seem to pull off the right mix of smarminess and charm to make him a natural with the Council—to look harder into exactly what the hell Kate Argent had wanted last night.

“You want me to investigate a Council Member?” Josh asks incredulously, sitting back against a chipped-and-scuffed desk and then immediately rocketing off of it when he remembers where they are, though not before the seat of his jet-black jeans winds up covered in a layer of gray dust.

“I want you to help me understand why she was so interested in the Prince’s arrest,” Theo counters fastidiously, and all while ignoring the cloud of dust that Josh’s irritated attempts to wipe his pants clean is creating.

“Probably because she’s a speciest asshole,” Josh mutters, but he doesn’t press further.

Theo extracts a promise from both him and Corey—Tracy’s already given—to keep whatever they find to themselves for now before he lets them go, all the while silently praying that all the subterfuge nets them three serial killers, or Theo’s going to have to arrest himself for obstruction. When he gets back outside twenty minutes later, Liam is sprawled out in the driver’s seat of his SUV, wedged back between the door and the seat back with his legs kicked up on his dash. He looks up from his phone as he spots Theo coming through the windshield and pulls a face, tapping exaggeratedly at a non-existent watch on his wrist as he does. Theo rolls his eyes and pulls the unlocked passenger door open.

“Have you ever actually seen a watch outside of a museum?” Theo asks pointedly as he climbs into the passenger seat and shuts the door behind himself.

“Shut up,” Liam answers, but it’s toothless and distracted, his attention on his phone as he pokes at it before tossing it—music now pouring from the SUV’s speakers, Liam’s phone connected to the SUV by a scuffed black auxiliary cable—into a cup-holder.

Saying that Eichen is grudging about letting Theo in to see Valack turns out to be a massive understatement: Theo has experienced strip searches that are less invasive than the pat-down he’s subjected to under the watchful eyes of three orderlies, Liam off to the side alternating between looking like he wants to laugh at the resigned expression Theo knows he’s wearing and looking supremely pissed off. This isn’t what we’d agreed to, he’d snarled at Eichen’s director when the order had first been given, forgetting to pretend that he wasn’t the one who’d arranged the whole thing; Theo had placed a hand on his arm and told him it’s fine, low and agitated-witness-soothing. Liam had subsided, grumbling, and Theo had pretended not to see the speculative look on the director’s face as he’d looked at Theo’s hand on Liam’s arm.

Ten minutes later, Theo feeling weirdly naked without his gun, his badge, or the charmed silver pendant he keeps tucked under his shirt that creates a brief but near-unbreakable protection spell and, more importantly, sets off an alert at the station, Theo follows Eichen’s director and Liam down a winding set of hallways further into the bowels of the building. Human as he is, he can still feel the magics in the air and floors and walls slide over his skin, thick and cloying and making it harder to breathe, somehow. He flicks his gaze up to Liam’s back, eyes running over the rigid outlines of Liam’s muscles he can see through Liam’s shirt, the tense line of his neck, and grimaces.

The director takes them right up to one final door and performs some kind of complicated hand gesture to take down the locking spell keeping it closed, and then pulls it open. He makes no move to go through it, though, and Theo starts to glance between him and Liam until he realizes that Liam is already moving, slipping through the doorway and into the long hallway past it. Biting back a surprised sound, Theo hurries to catch up with him and then jumps and whips his head around to look over his shoulder as the director slams the door back shut and—performing the same complicated hand gesture in reverse—puts the locking spell back up.

Swallowing, Theo looks back around, uneasiness starting to swim in his gut, and almost runs directly into Liam, who’d stopped in the middle of the hallway. The only reason he doesn’t is that Liam suddenly whirls around inhumanly fast and catches him, one hand on his shoulder and one on his hip. Theo stares at him, wide-eyed, but Liam doesn’t let go, immediately.

“You’ve got to promise me you’ll be careful,” Liam suddenly demands, and Theo frowns, focusing on the tense lines dug into the corners of Liam’s mouth and the way he can feel Liam’s fingers twisting a bit in the fabric of Theo’s clothes.

“Be careful…talking to him?” Theo tries to clarify, and nearly winces when he catches the tone to his own voice; first responder calm.

Liam snaps his teeth together around a quick, frustrated sound and tightens his grip; looking at him, Theo’s suddenly sure he doesn’t know his fingers are still wrapped tightly in Theo’s clothes. “He’s going to know things, okay,” Liam explains, quick and clipped. “He’s going to know things, and he’s going to try to use that to influence you, to make you tell him things that you wouldn’t otherwise.”

“Your Highness,” Theo starts quietly, just barely stopping himself from saying Liam, the sudden anxiety visible through the cracks in Liam’s expression eating at him. Considering his next words carefully, Theo finally says, “It’s an interrogation. I’ve done hundreds of them, it’ll—”

Liam cuts him off. “You haven’t done one like this. Just…” He stops himself, eyes roving over Theo’s face. “Just say you’ll be careful.”

“I’ll be careful,” Theo finds himself instantly replying, though he’d meant to joke, or feign insult at Liam’s lack of faith in his professional abilities, or literally anything else.

“Okay,” Liam says, apparently satisfied. He blows out a harsh breath and finally lets go of Theo’s clothes. “Okay. This way, c’mon.”

Theo stares after him, still feeling the phantom press of Liam’s fingers against his shoulder, against his hip, and then he shakes himself and jogs to catch up with him.

---

“Your Highness,” Valack greets as Liam leads Theo right up to the cell at the end of the hallway, though he stops a good few feet away; Theo very deliberately makes sure to stop firmly behind Liam’s right foot, keeps the angle of his body half-hidden behind the bulk of Liam’s right shoulder. “This is a surprise.”

“Is it?” Liam snaps, his arms coming up to cross over his chest; Theo has to resist the urge to glance at him.

“No,” Valack answers after a second, smooth and easy. “I suppose it isn’t.”

He rolls off of the narrow cot in the cell and onto his feet, his hands moving to clasp behind his back as he strolls nonchalantly up to the clear, dividing wall separating them. Once there, he plants his feet and smiles winsomely at Liam, and then his eyes flick to Theo over Liam’s shoulder.

“But this is,” He murmurs, and Theo feels his spine start to stiffen more and more as Valack so very blatantly studies him.

Theo waits, but Liam doesn’t say anything. He might not be able to say anything, actually: Theo glances at him and notes his rigid posture, the overly careful way that Liam is holding himself still, a barely-restrained sort of fury all over his face, and then he swallows, and takes a half-step to the side.

“I’m—” Theo starts to say.

“Agent Raeken, yes,” Valack interrupts. “Of Supernatural Division. A pleasure to meet you.”

The way he says the last part—smooth as an oil-slick and just as deceptively glossy—seems to snap Liam out of whatever fugue he’d fallen into. “Watch it, Valack.” He snarls, a particular rough-edged burr to his voice that speaks of fangs about to drop.

“You brought him to see me,” Valack reminds Liam pleasantly, and Theo wonders if Liam’s warning from before—promise me you’ll be careful—had really been meant for Theo at all, or if it’d been more inwardly-directed, for all that it’d been spoken aloud.

So Theo cuts in before Liam can respond, though he resists the urge to step forward, past the unspoken line drawn by Liam’s tense shoulders. “I asked him to.” Theo tells Valack, pulling his attention away from Liam. Once Valack is looking at him, he explains, “I was recently made aware of your work.”

“Mmm,” Valack hums, his gaze sharp on Theo’s face. “And what did you think?”

“I think you’re a goddamn psychopath,” Theo answers bluntly, and can feel Liam’s surprised look on the side of his face. But Theo ignores him and smiles blandly at Valack, clocking but not acknowledging the subtle tightening of Valack’s mouth.

“Science is messy,” Valack finally replies, his voice still smooth but the edges of his words a little sharper, a little more clipped. “A fact which your Council knows quite well. Tell me, how did they develop that lovely serum you and your officers use to dampen the abilities of Fae criminals?”

Theo doesn’t take the bait. “The humans and Fae you tortured. Why’d you do it?”

“Tortured?” Valack bites out before he can stop himself, his expression briefly twisting with fury before he gets it back under control. The smile he pastes on his face afterwards is rigid, more teeth and snarled upper lip than curved. “Her Majesty Talia Hale told me to find the Dread Doctors. I was simply doing as instructed.”

Theo opens his mouth, about to keep digging at the soft spot that Valack had so conveniently revealed, but Liam beats him to responding. “Don’t you dare blame—!”

Liam’s furious momentum is going to carry him forward, Theo realizes, over the invisible line that he’d seemed to have set for himself when he’d originally approached Valack’s cell. Theo doesn’t know where the certainty in himself comes from, but come it does, and he knows—knows—that Liam getting any closer to Valack would be capital-B bad, and he moves before he can stop himself. Twisting in front of Liam, he gets his hands on his shoulders and pushes him back a step, away from the cell.

Or he tries to, anyway, but he can’t. His body goes instantly rigid without his conscious input, something insidious gone slip-sliding through his mind and locking his muscles, holding him fast. Theo grits his teeth and thinks, as loudly as he can, get out of my head, Valack, as behind him Valack laughs, quietly and under his breath.

And then all at once the pressure of his presence in Theo’s mind is gone as Liam yanks him forwards, sending them both staggering backwards a few feet away from the cell. Theo half-collapses against Liam’s bracing arms, only absently aware of Liam’s rabbiting pulse under the fingertips Theo has pressed to his forearms, the feel of it almost drowned out by the cacophony of Theo’s own heartbeat pounding in his ears.

“Tell you what, Agent Raeken,” Valack suddenly says, and Theo twists around to look back at him, still half-bent and braced by Liam. The brief break in Valack’s composure is gone, replaced once again by his oozing charm and slick, slick smile. “You want answers? I’ll trade you, one for one.”

“What?” Theo asks breathily, just as Liam snarls, “That’s not how this is going to—”

“How many victims are the Dread Doctors up to, Your Highness?” Valack interrupts, flicking his eyes to Liam with disdain written all over his face. “Four, that you know of? You’re running out of time.”

Liam’s jaw clenches, and Theo’s willing to bet that he’s thinking of the same thing that Theo is: the neat stacks of the Argents’ files documenting the Dread Doctors’ various killing sprees, each containing twelve—and always twelve—victims. Forcing himself to take a deep, bracing breath, Theo straightens up and steps back from Liam, slowly but steadily. Liam makes a noise and reaches forward, and Theo makes sure to stay within arm's reach but turns to face Valack head-on once more, jaw working.

“One answer for one answer?” He checks, meeting Valack’s sharp, smirking gaze. Valack nods. “Fine.”

“Theo—” Liam protests, forgetting to call him Agent Raeken, but Theo cuts him off.

“The humans and Fae you—” tortured “—experimented on. What was the reason, how’d the experiments connect to the Dread Doctors?” Theo asks, forcing calm into his voice that he really doesn’t feel, especially not with the way that he can still feel the echo of Valack’s presence in his mind; with the way that he can feel Liam practically vibrating with tension behind his back.

Valack doesn’t even pretend to have to think. “The Doctors’ victims seemed randomly chosen, but they weren’t. I needed to figure out the connection between them.”

“And did you?” Theo presses unthinkingly, but Valack just smirks.

“Are your parents human, Agent Raeken?” Valack asks instead, voice pleasant but his eyes sharp on Theo’s face.

“What?” Theo says, echoed a second later and more harshly by Liam, but Valack just raises his eyebrows expectantly. Clenching his teeth, and trying—and failing—to see Valack’s potential angle, Theo grits out, “Yes.” And then, before Valack can speak again, Theo repeats, “Did you find the connection between the Doctors’ victims?”

“Yes,” Valack answers simply, his lips flickering as he apparently catches sight of the frustration that Theo can’t quite keep off his face. “What about your grandparents? Human as well?”

“All four of them,” Theo bites out, anticipating Valack’s next question and trying to throw him off. “What was the connection?”

Valack doesn’t answer right away, just roves his eyes over Theo’s face. When he does reply, it’s not with a straightforward—and irritatingly brief—response, to Theo’s private surprise. “If you’ve read the Argent’s files, then you know the first set of the Doctors’ victims were all Fae, as was the second, and the third. But the specific species killed varied, as did the numbers of each species. That seemed to suggest that the killings had something to do with Fae lineage, or Fae genetics. Except…”

He leaves it hanging, clearly waiting, so Theo—after a moment’s reluctant hesitation—fills in, “Except the fourth and fifth sets of victims were all humans.”

Valack just smiles, and then says, “Were they?” Theo feels his brow furrow, but before he can press for more detail Valack suddenly, abruptly switches tracks. “What did you feel when that witch gave you those werecoyote fangs?”

Theo feels the color drain out of his face, and he takes a half-step back. He doesn’t realize that the movement had nearly carried him into Liam until he feels Liam’s hands on his back and hip, steadying him. How did you…? He nearly asks, but he knows how. Theo glares and resists the urge to move farther back from the cell; farther back away from that invisible line that Theo had accidentally placed himself across, and where Valack had managed to get his mental claws into Theo’s head.

“What the fuck, Valack?” Liam hisses into the silence left by Theo’s lack of a response, his voice half a low, rumbling growl.

“An answer for an answer.” Valack replies primly, his eyes never leaving Theo’s face. He’s trying to hide it but Theo can see a hunger there, a spark of interest so very bright and burning that it’s letting the madness shine through his genteel facade. “I know you have more questions, Agent. So? What did you feel?”

“Hold on,” Liam interrupts, stepping around Theo so that they’re side by side, instead, though he leaves one of his hands behind, just brushing Theo’s hip. When Theo glances over at him, his eyes are brighter than they ordinarily would be, even under the harsh fluorescents of the building. “You didn’t answer his question about the connection.”

“I assure you I did,” Valack disagrees.

Liam’s about to continue arguing, Theo can both see and sense it, and Valack’s right—they’re running out of time—so he opens his mouth before Liam can. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Theo tells Valack, and the honesty of it tastes strange painted across the backs of his teeth; he hasn’t, he realizes, ever told anyone this, let alone a psychopathic mad scientist stuck in a supernatural prison. Let alone Liam, now staring at him, wide-eyed. “It—it felt like remembering something I’d lost. It felt like coming home.”

He’s expecting Valack to smirk again, to look somehow smug, but while his smile is sharp it isn’t vicious: it’s satisfied. Theo finds himself smothering the odd urge to move closer to Liam beside him, and then—to what he’s sure is visible surprise all over his face—he doesn’t have to, because Liam moves in closer to him.

“The connection, Valack. A better explanation of the connection or we walk,” Liam demands, and Theo finds himself thinking—dazed and unbidden and completely thrown by the certainty of the thought—that Valack won’t care if they walk, because Valack has already gotten what he wanted.

But to his surprise Valack answers, his smile gone benign and patronizing once more, just like it had been when Liam and Theo first walked in. “You’re right, Agent Raeken, in saying that the Dread Doctors’ latest victims were human.”

“But?” Theo manages to prompt when Valack pauses, clearly checking to see if he’s reclaimed Theo’s splintering attention.

“But not all of the branches of their genetic trees were,” Valack replies, and smiles directly at Theo as he does.

---

“—ken. Raeken. Theo.”

Theo jerks, realizing that Liam’s been trying to get his attention for the past…however long, and looks around from the passenger seat of Liam’s ancient SUV to meet his furrowed gaze. Liam raises his eyebrows when he sees that he finally has Theo’s focus, and Theo grimaces.

“Watch the road,” He orders, shifting some in his seat so he can straighten up out of the distracted slouch he’d sank into as Liam had driven them farther and farther away from Eichen.

Liam rolls his eyes but obligingly turns them back forward, though Theo bets that has more to do with the increasing amounts of afternoon rush-hour traffic creeping in around them on the interstate than actually acquiescing to Theo’s demand. His fingers are drumming frenetically against the steering wheel, and Theo has an odd moment of simultaneously wanting to tell him to knock it the hell off and experiencing the sense-memory of how they’d felt pressed against his arms, his hip. But remembering that just slides instantly and reflexively into remembering Valack’s curled-mouth insinuation, and Theo finds himself sinking back down into his seat, his eyes drifting back out the passenger side window.

Except that Liam suddenly reaches over to smack him in the chest with the back of his hand as he says exasperatedly, “Raeken, jesus. Get out of your own head.”

“God, what?” Theo snaps in return, more sibling-annoyed than actually irritated, jolting at the contact and turning to glare at Liam.

“If you let Valack get to you like this, then the terrorists win,” Liam says, primly and with a shit-eating grin twitching at the corners of his mouth, and Theo can’t help his begrudgingly amused snort. Then Liam’s expression sobers some, his jaw working side-to-side as he apparently mulls over his next words. “You think he’s right?” He finally asks. “About the human victims having Fae ancestors?”

“What’s his motive to lie?” Theo returns, the question meant for himself just as much for Liam; he’d been chewing it over since they’d left Eichen. Since Liam had taken him by the arm and hustled them both out of the building, really, practically dragging Theo in his wake.

“You’re the one who pointed out—correctly!—that he’s a psychopath,” Liam answers, a little sharply; Theo bets the tone has more to do with his blatant dislike of Valack than with Theo.

Theo hums, granting Liam the point. And then he shakes himself some, and straightens up again. “Well, I doubt we have to take his word for it. Do the Argents keep records of Fae bloodlines?” They kept records of literally everything else; it made sense that they’d be the obsessive blue-blood types.

“Yeah, they do. Not sure how extensive they—” He cuts himself off, abruptly, his head whipping around to stare out his own window; Theo can see his nostrils flaring wide in the reflection of the glass.

“What is it?” Theo demands, instincts immediately snapping taut.

Liam doesn’t answer right away. Theo can see his eyes roving in the window’s reflection, searching—searching the forest across the way, the two of them having pulled off the main interstate and onto a two-lane highway leading back into Beacon Hills.

“Your Highness,” Theo presses, and then he swallows a surprised shout as Liam suddenly jerks the wheel to the side, carrying them sharply onto the highway’s shoulder and setting off a flurry of furious horns behind them.

Liam throws the SUV into park and then bends awkwardly to get his hand on the handle for his window, cracking it down in a rush. In any other circumstances Theo would find the near-anachronistic sight absolutely hilarious, but as it is he just feels his own anxiety winching tighter with every rotation, his eyes on Liam’s face as he tips his head back to better scent the sudden influx of fresh air.

When Liam’s eyes snap open a half-second later, they’re bright gold and glowing.

“Revenant,” Liam breathes, and his flared eyes when he looks over at Theo are wide.

Theo stares at him for a second, his own mind briefly blanking with shock, and then his training and better sense kick in and he starts struggling with his seatbelt as he snaps, “Jesus, what are you waiting for? Go!”

Liam doesn’t move, his expression conflicted. “I can’t just leave yo—!”

“I’m a trained goddamn officer of the Supernatural Division, Your Highness!” Theo interrupts in a frustrated snarl, and then finally manages to get his seatbelt undone. He looks back up at Liam, glowering, and tells him, “I will be right behind you, now go!”

Liam stares at him for a moment longer and then he bites off a harsh sound and twists to open his door, nearly ripping it off its hinges in his haste; Theo can hear the metal protesting. He slams it back shut after himself and takes off across the highway, effortlessly darting between oncoming cars, inhumanely fast, and Theo absently despairs for the paperwork he’s going to have to fill out documenting the incident—and the apology he’s going to have to give to Finstock—as brakes screech and horns sound, Theo able to pick out more than one startled, disbelieving what the hell. Taking advantage of the momentarily stopped traffic, he throws himself out of the SUV after Liam and—brandishing his badge at the wide-eyed occupants of the stopped cars—runs after Liam and into the woods.

It isn’t hard to follow him; Liam leaves a trail of broken branches and turned earth as he goes, and Theo hurries after him as fast as he can, cursing at the treacherous footing. And then he stumbles and nearly falls anyway when a vicious snarl splits the air, brutal and somehow enraged, and Theo swears colorfully and picks up his pace, ignoring his twisting ankles and burning thighs; getting right back up when a slick rock shifts under his foot and he trips, catching himself hard on his right palm.

The fight is already in full-swing by the time Theo manages to catch up to Liam, but Theo barely has time to clock Liam slashing at a blank-eyed woman, because his attention snags on Corey. He’s huddled down with his hands over his head and protected underneath a shimmering barrier held up by another man, whose teeth are clenched and whose outstretched arms are straining as he struggles to maintain it. Theo’s confused—why the barrier if Liam had successfully engaged the revenant?—until he isn’t, Corey’s eyes widening and his mouth starting to open in a warning that he doesn’t get to voice before Theo chokes and goes sprawling as something cracks hard across his spine.

He rolls over and looks up—his spine and the muscles of his back shrieking—and finds himself staring at a tall, oddly-dressed figure that he wishes he didn’t recognize, Theo’s adrenaline-filled mind still managing to dredge up the Pathologist even as his hands start reflexively scrambling for his gun and its iron-cored bullets. But none of his shots land. The second he fires, the Pathologist lifts up a gloved hand—their fingertips glowing an electric blue—and the bullets deflect wildly; Theo curses and stops shooting, too aware of Liam still fighting the revenant nearby.

Except that leaves him momentarily defenseless—Theo scrabbling at his shirt to try and get at the pendant around his neck, desperate to trigger both the spell and the automatic alert it’ll send up at Supernatural Division—and the Pathologist starts to advance. Theo’s nearly distracted by the unreal way they move, juddering and jerky like film reels skipping, but he grits his teeth and forces himself to ignore it, his fingers just closing around the pendant when Corey suddenly shouts, “Theo!,” high-pitched and panicked.

Theo hears a fierce roar, and just underneath it the other man with Corey yelling, “Liam, I can’t break the barrier, you have to—!,” but the confusing cacophony of it gets lost underneath a surge of panic as Theo feels a supernaturally strong hand close around his neck and lift him up, Theo’s feet kicking uselessly at the ground as he’s dragged upwards. Gasping for air, Theo manages to focus on the body and face connected to the arm holding him in the air and feels his breath freeze in his chest as he looks down at the Surgeon, the Argent family’s sketch somehow entirely failing to capture the insidiousness of them; the way they seem to ooze otherworldliness and threat.

And then he sees the object in the Surgeon’s other hand and he gives a hoarse shout.

He throws out a hand to catch the Surgeon’s wrist and try to hold it—and the complicated-looking syringe—at bay, but it’s like trying to halt a piston from moving; the Surgeon barely even pauses, just shifts their grip on Theo’s neck to better expose the vein on the side of it. From somewhere far away Theo hears Liam snarl, and Corey and the other man yelling, but he can’t focus on any of it, too focused on the deceptively slight prick of the needle as it touches his skin.

And then he’s falling, hitting the ground hard and crumpling sideways as the Surgeon abruptly releases him. Choking on a pained gasp, Theo coughs harshly and then forces his eyes upward, desperate to see what’s happening; to see why the Surgeon had released him.

What he sees is both the Surgeon and the Pathologist steadily stumbling back, one jerky, lumbering step after the other as—as someone shoots at them. This time the Pathologist’s glove and electromagnetic barrier don’t seem to do them any good, the force of whatever the bullets are made of punching right through it, and Theo drags his gaze unsteadily across the ground until he catches sight of the man advancing slowly but relentlessly across the uneven forest floor, some kind of modified shotgun in his hands and a cool, calm expression on his face. Theo stares, shocked.

And then he bites off a surprised noise when a sudden whirlwind of air kicks up, whipping dirt and dried leaves up and into the air. Theo curls reflexively into himself to shield his face, and only relaxes back out once the wind disappears, almost as quickly as it had come.

When he lowers his arm and glances around, the Pathologist and the Surgeon are gone, the man with Corey has lowered the barrier and has collapsed back onto his heels, panting and sweating and with—Theo absently notes with interest—Corey reaching forward to steady him, and Liam is standing fang-mouthed and flare-eyed over the apparently dead revenant. But it’s the mystery man who catches Theo’s attention, because Theo knows that face, the name tickling at the back of his mind from a dozen half-remembered meetings.

Except then he doesn’t have to keep wondering, because Liam gasps out, “Argent?,” and Theo has it.

Chris Argent.

---

Even with all the years that Theo has worked for Supernatural Division, he’s never been to the royal residence, which is probably why it takes him so completely by surprise that the Fae King lives in a nondescript split-level in the middle of one of Beacon Hill’s suburban neighborhoods.

“For the record,” Liam bitches as he’s lowering Theo down onto the couch in Scott’s living room, Theo’s arm over his shoulder and one hand wrapped tightly around Theo’s opposite hip, his fingers rucked deliberately up under Theo’s shirt so that he can palm bare skin and siphon Theo’s pain, “this bullshit right here is exactly why I wanted you to wait in the car.”

“Maybe you should have said that, then,” Theo huffs through gritted teeth, more than ready to dive headfirst into an idiotic argument with Liam if it means he won’t have to think too hard about where he can still feel the slightest prick of soreness on the side of his neck from the Surgeon’s needle.

Liam’s about to reply when Mason—the man who’d thrown up the barrier around Corey and had, to Theo’s bemused amusement, managed to introduce himself to Theo in the middle of the screaming match that Liam and Argent had almost immediately devolved into after the Dread Doctors’ disappearance—lets out a heartfelt, exhausted groan as Corey and Argent get him settled carefully onto the couch’s other end. Argent straightens up immediately but Corey twists so that he’s perched on the cushions beside Mason, his hands fluttering over Mason’s arms and closest knee like he’s trying to figure out first where he should put them and second whether putting them anywhere is going to do anyone any good.

Theo—recognizing that very specific there-isn’t-a-form-for-this panic—shifts some and, ignoring Liam’s irritated sound and the way he has to quickly change up his grip from Theo’s hip to the side of his neck to keep them connected, reaches out a gentle hand and prods Corey lightly in the side. “Hey,” He rasps, when Corey looks wide-eyed over at him. “Not your fault.”

Corey colors some but Argent cuts in before he can reply, Argent’s eyes on the disturbingly stark necklace of bruises around Theo’s throat as he tells Theo, “You should try and avoid talking until we can take care of those.”

Theo’s about to say something tart about Argent’s specific use of the word ‘we,’ when Liam—Theo’s chest twisting with an unexpected burst of amusement—beats him to it. “‘We?’” He repeats in a strangled, outraged voice. “What the fuck, ‘we,’ Argent—you still haven’t explained what the fuck you were doing there!”

“Oddly,” Argent replies calmly, seemingly entirely unfazed by Liam’s hostility, “neither have you.”

Liam’s eyes start to flare and the tips of his teeth that Theo can see between Liam’s parted lips are sharp, but before he can respond, a sudden, piercing whistle splits the air of the house. Theo jerks hard enough in surprise that he accidentally jerks away from Liam’s fingers on his neck, and pain comes roaring back so fierce and so suddenly that he nearly chokes with it. Liam makes a stifled sound and follows him quickly forward, this time getting his full palm laid carefully against the side of Theo’s neck as he resumes siphoning Theo’s pain. The movement presses Liam’s legs up tight against Theo’s on the couch, one of his knees between both of Theo’s; Theo finds himself pressing reflexively back.

But then his attention is immediately dragged away to Malia, who drops her fingers away from her mouth and raises her eyebrows at the clustered mass of Theo and Liam and Corey and Mason and Argent all arranged Scott’s living room. Scott is beside her, and the muscle at the corner of his jaw that Theo can see starts to stand out more and more starkly as he runs his eyes over the room.

“So,” He says finally into the resulting uncomfortable silence. “Who wants to go first?”

“I vote Argent,” Liam answers immediately, his tone falsely bright.

But Scott just gives him a dry look. “Thanks for volunteering, Liam.” He replies instead, and raises his eyebrows pointedly; Liam’s jaw works.

He also isn’t speaking, so Theo—brow furrowing as he glances briefly up at Liam’s mutinous expression before refocusing on Scott—manages to rasp out, “We were on our way back from Eichen—”

He knows something’s wrong the second Scott’s eyebrows shoot up and he repeats, “On your way back from Eichen…?,” in a strangled voice, just as Argent looks heavenward and tells Theo again, “You should really stop talking until those bruises are healed.”

“I can—” Mason starts to say into the resulting furious silence, starting to push himself shakily up from his exhausted slump.

“No, you can’t,” Liam interrupts him, snapping it. “Maintaining that barrier already almost killed you. Stiles will take care of Theo when he gets here.”

Mason collapses back down, looking a heart-wrenching mix of guilty and absolutely relieved. This time Corey does reach forward, laying a hand gently on Mason’s arm and giving Mason a flicker of a smile. Theo studies them for a second, and then looks back over at where Scott is now raking his—surprisingly still human—fingers down his face.

“Maintaining what barrier?” He groans, and it’d almost be theatrical if it weren’t for the fact that they’d all nearly died less than an hour ago. “Liam!”

“There was a revenant in the woods, okay!” Liam all but shouts, his frustration finally breaking through. But for all that he twists around to glare hotly at Scott, he keeps his palm firmly against the side of Theo’s bruised neck. “Raeken and I were on our way back from Eichen, and I smelled it, and when we found it, it was attacking Mason and Corey.”

“Just Corey, actually,” Mason interrupts quietly, his eyes flicking apologetically to Corey. “It honestly couldn’t seem to care less about me, except for the part where I was holding up the barrier keeping it from getting to him.”

This is the first Theo’s hearing about this, and he feels panic flare sharp in his chest as he struggles a little more upright so that he can glare more effectively at Corey. “What does he mean, it was after you?”

“Oh my god, stop talking!” Liam yells, at the same time that Argent chastises Agent Raeken. Theo rolls his eyes but obediently slumps back down, a little grateful; even with Liam’s pain-siphoning, the rasp of his own voice across his bruised vocal cords had felt not unlike someone taking a cheese grater to his throat.

“And then the two Dread Doctors showed up,” Corey says softly, picking up the thread of the explanation. “And, um.” He pauses, and flicks his eyes over to Argent. “And then Mr. Argent did.”

“You left out the part where the Surgeon went after Agent Raeken,” Argent replies, though the words aren’t a criticism. They are an insinuation, though, and Theo finds himself tipping his chin up in reflexive challenge as he and Argent lock eyes, Argent’s gaze hard and studying him in a not-altogether-friendly kind of way.

Scott stares blinking out at all of them for a moment longer, and then he drops his face into his hands with another heartfelt groan. Beside him, Malia grins, wide and amused, and pats him between his hunched-over shoulder blades.

“I’m ordering pizza,” She announces, seemingly to the room at large, and her grin only gets wider when everyone looks over at her. “I get the feeling that it's going to be a long night.”

---

“So you didn’t exactly have permission to take me to Eichen, it seems,” Theo murmurs to Liam a few hours later, his fingers wrapped around a mug of a spicy, cinnamon-and-clove tea that Stiles had shoved into Theo’s hands after healing the worst of the bruises around his neck, with an order to keep drinking it until Stiles told him he could stop.

(“I could have given you a tonic made of turmeric and cayenne,” He’d told Theo tartly when Theo had first looked dubiously down at the tea. “I could still do that.” He’d added threateningly, and Theo had made as quick and as a graceful an exit with his mug as he could.)

He and Liam are in a quiet corner of Scott’s kitchen, as out of the way as it’s possible for them to get in a house that’s bursting at the seams with people. Immediately after Theo makes his comment to Liam he has to shift to allow Argent past with another boxful of Fae genealogical records, Argent absently thanking him as he heads for the dining room table that Allison and Lydia and Tracy had colonized. Over in the living room Stiles and Mason and Corey are sitting in a lopsided circle on the floor, the coffee table shoved out of the way to make room for a chaotic mix of Druidic supplies—including a small chalk board that Theo, without any evidence to back up his theory whatsoever, is somehow certain Stiles stole from the high school—as they try to further backtrace the spell that had affected Liam a few nights ago. Scott and Malia are still outside on the back porch with the Hale siblings and Kira, talking quietly about Kira’s clash with the encroaching alphas on Beacon Hill’s southern border; Theo can just barely hear them.

Liam blows out a rough breath in response to Theo’s quiet question-disguised-as-a-statement, straightening up some where he’d been slumped over disinterestedly poking at his phone. “Scott doesn’t trust Valack,” He says eventually, which isn’t really what Theo asked.

Theo lets it go. “Can’t say I blame him,” He says instead, shrugging with one shoulder when Liam looks over at him; Liam grimaces, his eyes flicking to Theo’s mouth. If he wanted to Theo could misunderstand the look, but he knows what Liam’s thinking: what did you feel when that witch gave you those werecoyote fangs?

Liam looks away after a second, clearly distracted. He drums his fingertips against the counter, a steady wave of rap-rap-raps that takes on a different, ringing note after a few repetitions; when Theo glances down, curious, he sees that it’s because Liam has absently extended the claws on his fidgeting hand, and the tips of them give more a sharp click than his soft, human fingertips had. Theo pulls his gaze away after a few seconds of watching, twisting some instead to put his hip to the counter so that he can look idly out over the controlled chaos of the living room at Stiles’ widely gesturing hands and Mason’s politely dubious expression; at the furrow between Corey’s brow as he looks back and forth between them, his and Mason’s crossed legs close enough together to almost be touching.

“It’s just…” Liam suddenly starts, picking back up on his and Theo’s conversation. “It’s just that things have been…things have been good lately, you know?” Theo doesn’t know, and that must be clear on his face when he refocuses on Liam because Liam huffs out another frustrated sound and tosses his head, rough and jerky. “Fae-human relations,” Liam clarifies, blunt.

Theo finds his lips flickering in a smile, amused for reasons that he’d have difficulty putting into words. It’s Liam’s tone, he thinks; the absolute lack of diplomacy or careful maneuvering in the way he says it. Theo’s so used to hearing those words couched in nuance, or insinuation; of having to hide his grimace of distaste at the casual prejudice usually hidden at their core, just a thin scratch away from being revealed like cheap tinfoil peeling back. But Liam’s tone is clean, unburdened by political bullshit or delicate handling, and Theo has to stop himself from mouthing the words, just the way Liam had said them: Fae-human relations.

“They’ve been good?” He prompts instead, taking another sip of his tea that by all rights should have gone disgustingly lukewarm by now, but is still pleasantly drinkable; druids, seriously.

Liam side-eyes him like he suspects Theo is making fun of him, somehow. But after a second of Theo meeting his gaze levelly, Liam turns back towards the counter, his mouth curling in a small, thoughtful frown. “What?” He replies eventually. “You don’t agree?”

“I don’t…disagree,” Theo offers instead, hedging. Liam gives him a dry look and Theo shrugs again, a somewhat sheepish but equally unapologetic gesture. A silent shorthand for an admittedly jaded thought: the world was a messed-up place, what could anyone do?

“Well, they’ve been better for us,” Liam says finally, a little defiantly. “Kate and Gerard’s Fae registration bill got voted down. Allison’s been thinking about running for the Council to counter their influence, she thinks it’s the right time. The mayor passed that land use preservation bill, remember? The one that saved that family of dryads who’ve lived in the Preserve since like, the Big Bang.” He pauses, and gives Theo a sly little look. “Only one member of the Fae court has been arrested by Supernatural Division in the last year.”

Theo rolls his eyes, but he can’t fully hide his smirk, and honestly doesn’t try that hard to.

“And it’s—it’s because of Scott.” Liam continues, insistently, like he has to convince Theo of the truth of what he’s saying. “It’s because of Scott and this—this new world.”

He says the last two words with these conspicuous air quotes, ‘new world,’ but Theo, strangely, knows what he means, and hums to show it when he catches the uncertain, slightly self-conscious look Liam shoots him. Liam lets his gaze linger when he realizes that Theo isn’t going to take the opening to make fun of him—maybe expecting him to have broken into that one song from that Disney movie with the carpet ride or something—and bites his lip.

“They’d blame him,” Liam concludes, and this time doesn’t sound uncertain at all. “If all this with the Dread Doctors got out, they’d blame him. It wouldn’t matter that he wasn’t King then, or that he couldn’t unilaterally make the decision to reveal the Doctors’ existence, not with the other Fae communities involved. The humans would blame him.”

Theo studies him. He gets the feeling that he should maybe be trying harder to disguise that fact, or at least shouldn’t be so blatant about it, but. Liam looks back, his eyes bright in the overhead lights of the kitchen; not quite gold, but not their usual human blue. He’s dropped the shift away from his nervously flittering fingertips, too; the drum of them against the countertop is back to being a steady, solid beat, rather than a pointed clack.

Before he can think too hard about it, Theo drops a hand away from his mug to flatten his fingers over Liam’s, pressing them down into the counter to stop their fidgeting. Theo’s skin is over-warm from the mug of tea but even still he feels the heat from the back of Liam’s hand, feels the bumps of his knuckles; feels the way Liam’s pulse jumps against the sensitive pads of his fingertips as Liam looks up at him in surprise. Theo just grins, and it’s a smaller and softer thing than he’d meant it to be.

“Such a stereotype,” He says lightly, and grins wider when he sees Liam’s brow furrow. “The noble prince, riding out to save the kingdom.”

“Oh, fuck you!” Liam squawks, but he’s laughing helplessly as he does it. He bumps his shoulder against Theo’s in a pointed rebuke, but he also does it in such a way that it doesn’t dislodge Theo’s hand still holding his own still.

Theo means to let him go then but instead he presses down harder on their stacked hands, frowning slightly as he looks down at them; at where he can feel Liam’s fingers still trying to drum. “Okay, what is up with you?”

Liam gives him a strange look so Theo raises his eyebrows and pointedly lifts his hand. Immediately Liam’s fingertips start up their tap-tap-tapping wave again, and Liam looks down at them, wide-eyed, like they’ve somehow betrayed him; like they maybe belonged to someone else. He jerks the offending hand up and into his chest, absently cradling it with his other, seemingly innocent hand, but Theo finds his attention pulled away by the expression on Liam’s face. Pinched, uncertain; a little worried. Theo waits.

“It’s weird, right?” He says, apropos of nothing. He makes a face after he’s said it, like he knows that he’s being—apparently unintentionally—cryptic, and clarifies. “It’s weird that Corey went to Mason for help with the spell, and that they back-traced it to that spot in the woods, and then they were attacked by a revenant and the Dread Doctors themselves.”

And then Corey was attacked, Theo thinks but doesn’t say, remembering Mason’s apologetic look at Corey when Mason had offered his limited explanation earlier. He looks out towards Stiles and Corey and Mason again; at where their serious efforts had apparently devolved into frustrated fucking around, Stiles making sparks jump in between his fingertips that he then, somehow, passes off to Mason, Corey laughing incredulously and leaning back out of the way. But, Theo realizes, watching him, not leaning that far, his shoulder still nearly brushing Mason’s.

“I’m not a cop, but it seems like too much of a coincidence,” Liam concludes, and the defiance is back in his voice. A dare for Theo to disagree with him. But…

“It is a lot of coincidence for one afternoon,” Theo agrees quietly, and flicks his gaze to Liam’s.

Liam looks back, eyes clearly searching Theo’s face to see if Theo is somehow humoring him, but he must not see anything, because he gives a short, sharp nod and lets his attention drift away, back into the middle distance and his fingers falling back to the counter to pick right back up on their—apparently unconscious—nervous drumming. Letting it go, Theo leans back more heavily against the counter and takes another long drink of tea, his eyes slowly closing as he absently tries to follow the flow of magic down his throat; as he tries to feel it as it spreads out warm and insistent through his veins, his muscles, healing him as it goes.

And then he grins, amused, because he can feel a different kind of burning against his throat.

“You know,” He tells Liam thoughtfully, tongue making its way into his cheek, “you keep looking at the bruises like that—” Like Liam had been all night, really, “—I’m going to start thinking you have a thing for them.”

He slides his eyes open just in time to see Liam flush scarlet, the nervous drumming of his fingers halting as he freezes. Then he scowls and meets Theo’s gaze, but he has to drag his eyes up from the fading bruises still circling Theo’s neck to do it, and Theo grins wider.

“Shut up,” Liam mutters, his gaze skipping away and back to the relative safety of the empty counter and his locked phone. But there’s no real heat to his voice, and the next look he shoots Theo—quick and sharp-eyed and from under his ducked brow—isn’t embarrassed.

It isn’t embarrassed at all.

---

The next morning, Theo’s sat at Scott’s kitchen table blearily watching Tracy hum absently to herself as she clacks away on her laptop, his neck stiff from falling asleep on the couch and his shoulder phantom-warm from where Liam had fallen asleep against it, trying to decide if the warmth of the latter is canceling out the annoyance of the former, when three sharp raps sound at Scott’s front door.

“I’ve got it,” Scott says, over the sounds of several loud complaints and a cresting wave of irritated groaning from the various lumps of blankets and pillows spread out throughout the living room.

When he opens the door Josh is on the other side, hands tucked in his pockets and a skeptical expression already on his face. Scott waves him inside with the hand he has clutched around a cup of coffee, his other hand still braced on the front door to hold it open.

“Hey, boss,” Josh greets, sliding somewhat warily past Scott and making his way towards Theo. He says it kind of absently, his attention more on the slumber party of sorts happening in Scott’s living room; Theo just gives the middle of Scott’s table a dry look and downs another mouthful of coffee. “Hey, Tracy.”

“Hi, Josh!” Tracy chirps, sounding irritatingly well-rested.

And she undoubtedly is, because in addition to seemingly having been platonically adopted by Lydia and Allison as another smart-mouthed mini-genius, she’d also been not-so-platonically adopted by Cora Hale, who’d walked in with her brother last night—windswept and still a little wild-eyed from their apparently successful hunt for Kali and Ennis with Kira—and had taken one look at Tracy blinking wide-eyed and slack-mouthed back at her and had smiled with all teeth. While the rest of them had been falling asleep on whatever furniture had been unclaimed by the time they’d all been too tired to think anymore, Tracy had spent the night splitting a futon in Scott’s basement with Cora at Cora’s open-quotes suggestion.

Josh shares a reflexive, longsuffering look with Theo at Tracy’s characteristic morning-cheerfulness and then drops languidly into an empty chair by Theo’s side. His eyes drift down to the last vestiges of the bruises around Theo’s throat—almost completely gone, now, even with how stark they’d been less than twelve hours ago—and then he jumps slightly and looks up when Scott places a mug of coffee in front of him.

“Milk?” Scott asks. “Sugar?”

“Uh.” Josh says eloquently, his eyes flicking to Theo as if for instructions as to how he’s supposed to respond to the Fae King offering to fix him his coffee; Theo meanly says nothing. “I’m good. Thanks.”

Scott shrugs and wanders away, back towards the living room towards where Stiles has rolled reluctantly upright and it glaring out into the middle distance with a sleepy scowl on his face. The effect is ruined somewhat by Derek’s arm still thrown over his lap from Derek still asleep face-down behind him, and by the fact that Stiles had apparently made the questionable decision to fall asleep on a throw pillow; the faux-western pattern of it is imprinted across his cheek.

“Your text said you had something,” Theo eventually prompts, when it becomes clear that the overwhelming weirdness of the morning is throwing Josh completely off. Theo sympathizes, but he’s also had forty-eight hours longer to get used to this insanity, and also there are still three serial killers running around.

“Uh, yeah,” Josh manages, shaking himself some and then picking up the coffee Scott had set in front of him to take a healthy, fortifying sip. Only afterwards does he seem to remember where it’d originally come from, and he looks askance at it, thrown again. Theo not-so-subtly raps his knuckles on the kitchen table and Josh jolts. “Yeah, I ran into Matt Daehler at that new Indian place downtown, talked to him a bit.”

Ran into is probably a poor choice of words. Professionally stalked is probably more accurate. Theo raises his eyebrows to show that he’s both heard and caught Josh’s word choice; Josh grins. The silent ribbing actually seems to settle him, somewhat; he leans back a little more loosely in his chair and takes another sip of coffee, this time without the blinking theatrics over its origins.

“And what did Councilman Daehler have to say?” Theo wonders aloud, feeding Josh’s need to showboat because it’s literally the fastest way to get information out of him.

Josh smirks. “He said Kate Argent missed three days of votes a few weeks ago, including her father’s second attempt at their previously voted-down Fae registration bill.”

That’s interesting, Theo thinks, but aloud he just says, “Was this before or after he tried to pick you up?”

“After,” Josh answers airily, grinning all the while. “I got the impression he thought some hot Council gossip might sweeten the deal.”

Josh would sleep with a Council member in general and Matt Daehler in particular firmly on the other side of never, but something about his smug face and general aura of self-assured confidence seems to work like catnip for them regardless, loosening their jaws and letting secrets tumble out that in other circumstances they’d have the sense to keep locked behind their teeth. Theo shakes his head some, marveling.

“He know why she missed the votes?” Theo asks, turning his coffee mug in absent, counter-clockwise circles against the table as his mind starts to kick into high gear.

Josh shrugs. “He had a few theories, but nothing definite. But…” He adds, dragging the single syllable out, eyes gleaming. “I did some more digging, and it turns out Councilwoman Argent didn’t just miss the votes—she left town.”

That’s interesting, but Theo doesn’t have time to address it before someone else is cutting in. “Where was she?” Argent demands, materializing from goddamn nowhere like he’d been summoned by the simple act of Josh invoking the Argent name; both Josh and Theo jump this time, Theo swearing colorfully as coffee spills over the edge of his mug and down across his hand.

He sticks the side of his palm reflexively into his mouth to clean it, and only afterwards looks up to realize that Liam—sat up on the couch now, mussed and clearly only half-awake—is staring, wide-eyed, at him. Theo freezes for a second, lips still wrapped around the edge of his hand, and stares right back; Liam’s gaze drops momentarily to Theo’s mouth, and Theo swears he can see Liam swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

And then he realizes that Liam isn’t the only one looking at him. Josh is desperately trying to catch his eye, a poorly-disguised sort of panic on his face as he flicks his gaze back and forth between Argent looming above the kitchen table and Theo still sat with his hand idiotically shoved in his mouth. Grimacing at himself, Theo pulls his hand away and—giving up on dignity altogether—wipes it on his pant leg to get the last of the coffee off.

“It’s fine,” He tells Josh as he does it. “He’s on our—” He nearly says side before he stops himself, because he’s still not actually sure if there are technically sides here, and even if there are, who’s on which one. “He’s trying to stop the Dread Doctors, too.” He finally concludes, a little lamely; Josh catches the gracelessness of his reply, his brow furrowing.

“...okay,” Josh says after a long, awkward pause. “Well.” He straightens up some, visibly switching into reporting-to-the-Captain mode rather than ragging-on-Theo-in-the-disguise-of-being-a-respectful-employee mode. “I don’t know where, exactly,” He starts apologetically. “This investigation is, uh—”

“Off-books,” Theo offers wryly, and Josh grimaces.

“—so I couldn’t exactly get a warrant for her credit card records or a tracking spell, but I was able to pull toll records from State Highway 32, and she headed north, up towards Oregon,” Josh concludes.

The line of Argent’s mouth goes hard. “That means something to you,” Theo realizes, eyes narrowing as he searches Argent’s face.

“Maybe,” Argent says, and then stops, infuriatingly. Theo glares at him and Josh side-eyes Theo, clearly trying to decode the interaction and finding absolutely nothing to help him do that.

“God, seriously, Argent?” Liam complains, half-draping himself over the back of the couch and glowering as he interjects himself into the conversation. “Cut the cryptic bullshit, you’re not Deaton.”

“Hey, bite your heathen tongue!” Stiles suddenly yells, and pelts the throw pillow he’d been sleeping on at Liam, who fails to duck in time, and takes it directly to the side of the face with a surprised shout and nearly goes flailing ass-over-teakettle over the back of the couch.

Argent ignores all this byplay with admirable aplomb, but it’s Scott—also unfazed by Liam’s war cry as he makes a dive for Stiles and then, unsurprisingly, gets intercepted by Derek sitting up and moving with inhuman speed to tackle him sideways—that frowns at Argent from his place perched on one of the arms of the living room’s loveseat and admonishes gently. “Chris.”

“It’d be pure speculation at this point, Scott,” Argent replies, shaking his head.

“Know what we call that in the law enforcement world?” Theo says, falsely bright and baring his teeth in a toothy, not-altogether-friendly smile when Argent looks over at him. “A lead.”

The look Argent gives him is dry enough to catch flame. “I need to do more investigating, first,” He counters, putting a particular emphasis on investigating that makes Theo’s teeth grind.

“Great,” Theo replies, and nods towards Josh. “Agent Diaz can help you.”

“I don’t—” Argent starts to say, expression narrowing, just as Josh yelps, “Wait, what?”

But Theo just turns to Scott. “Are we in this together or not, Your Majesty? Because if we’re not…” He leaves the threat hanging.

But it’s unnecessary, and probably was even before he said it. Scott sighs and rubs a tired hand over his face. “We’re in this together,” He confirms, his tone a little wry as he meets Theo’s eyes. Theo feels a flash of embarrassment before he reminds himself of the one hundred and eighty-two years of Fae silence on the matter, and then he doesn’t feel bad anymore.

“Fine,” Argent snaps; Josh just stares at Theo, an almost comical expression of betrayal all over his face.

“Fine, great,” Theo agrees, and now he’s the one rubbing his face tiredly. “Then you and I—” He starts, craning his neck to look towards the living room to try and catch a glimpse of Liam yelling and still trying and failing to wriggle his way out of Derek’s smirking, effortless hold, Stiles hollering gleeful commentary behind him, “—need to get back out to the woods, figure out what the hell happened yesterday.”

“Corey should stay here,” Mason suddenly pipes up, appearing in the mouth of the hallway leading to the guest bedrooms, Corey at his side. “The revenant from yesterday is dead—” That’s a tactful understatement if Theo has ever heard one; Liam had all but shredded the revenant from yesterday, “—but I get the feeling that he’s still got a target on his back.” He grimaces at Corey apologetically, but Corey just gives him a slight, understanding smile.

Theo’s about to agree with Mason—if Mason hadn’t suggested Corey stay at Scott’s, Theo had been planning on escorting him back to Supernatural Division and handcuffing him to his desk in the middle of the bullpen—but he’s beaten to the punch.

“I think—I think we all have to stay here,” Tracy suddenly says, and a little blankly. Theo turns to look at her, brow furrowing, and catches sight of the stunned look on her face as she stares down at her computer screen. After a second she glances up, into his eyes, and swallows. “It’s the program I wrote to track which citizens have Fae ancestors, according to the Argent records of Fae genealogy.” Tracy explains, and then she bites her lip and says, “And, well,” and swivels her laptop around so they can see.

And, well, indeed, Theo thinks, staring at the list of twenty or so names he can see, including Donovan Donati’s and the three other Dread Doctor victims. He notes them with interest, but they aren’t the ones that catch his attention, his eyes snagging specifically on Tracy’s name, and Josh’s, and Corey’s, and Deputy Romero’s from Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department.

And his own.

---

“Would you stop looking at me like that?” Theo mutters a few hours later, sat in the front seat of his parked truck with his attention ostensibly on the files in his lap—the necessary props to go along with the bullshit cover story he’d prepared for Deputy Romero—but his focus constantly pulled away by the burning sensation against the side of his face where Liam won’t stop staring at him.

“Sorry,” Liam says automatically, and not sounding very sorry at all. He also doesn’t stop looking, which Theo viciously thinks entirely moots his apology.

“Your Highness,” He grits out, and Liam holds up his hands, palms out and facing Theo.

“Sorry!” He repeats, and this time does actually sound kind of sorry, high-pitched and kind of squeaky. “But, c’mon. You don’t think it’s weird?” He doesn’t actually give Theo a chance to respond, insisting defensively. “This is so goddamn weird, you don’t smell like a werecoyote at all.”

“According to Tracy’s program, my last Fae ancestor was like, seven generations ago,” Theo reminds him, leaning over him briefly to yank open the truck’s glove console and paw around in it, looking for a binder clip or rubber band or something to hold the case files in his hands together. “Of course I don’t smell like werecoyote.”

The brief snapshot of Liam’s face Theo sees as he leans back doesn’t look satisfied. “How do the Dread Doctors even know you had Fae ancestors?”

Theo throws up his hands—nearly undoing all his hard work with the papers in his lap—and shoots Liam an incredulous, annoyed look. “Why would I know that?” He demands, glaring at him. “Of the two of us, you’re the one who’s actually Fae. You tell me how they’d know.”

Liam’s jaw clenches, and he doesn’t answer, because he can’t. “How are you not more weirded out about this? You’re technically part Fae, which means you’ve got a giant freakin’ bullseye on your chest.”

“I am weirded out,” Theo counters. “But I’ve also got a job to do. As do you,” He reminds Liam pointedly. “Do you remember your cover story, here?”

Liam rolls his eyes and slumps back in the passenger seat. “I’m a consultant you brought in on ritualistic serial killers.” He says it kind of petulantly, and his presentation isn’t helped at all by his sulky expression and the way he crosses his arms over his chest.

“Great,” Theo deadpans. “Say it exactly like that, she’ll have no suspicions whatsoever.” Liam flips him off, and Theo reaches for his door handle. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Theo flashes his badge—his other badge, the one that says Special Crimes Division rather than Supernatural Division—at the deputy manning Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department’s front desk and smiles as charmingly as he can given the week he’s had. He must pull it off to some degree, because the young deputy behind the desk flushes to his ears and stutters out a response before scurrying off to go find Deputy Romero. Theo blinks after the deputy—there’s a phone right there on the desk—but he’s soon distracted by Liam’s loud, not-at-all-subtle laugh.

“Geez, tone it down, Casanova,” He cackles. Theo thinks his amusement is especially rich considering he’s leaned back against the counter like some kind of muscle-bound catalog model just waiting for the photographer to return.

Theo barely swallows down the heartfelt—if harmless—fuck you on his tongue, absently wondering when he became the type of person who could exchange casual profanity with a member of the Fae royal court, when the deputy returns with Deputy Romero in tow. She has her hair pulled back from her face, which is wearing the world’s least impressed expression, and she takes one look at Theo’s general air of exhaustion and Liam’s sprawled-back posture and her eyebrows shoot up. Theo grimaces and straightens up, elbowing Liam as he goes; Liam yelps out an irritated hey, but then seems to finally catch their audience and clamps his mouth shut as his spine snaps straight.

“I’m Deputy Romero,” She greets, holding out a hand for Theo and then Liam to shake as the other deputy scurries back behind the station’s front desk. “Deputy Strauss said you had information on a few of my missing persons cases?”

“We do,” Theo agrees, and holds up the case files in his hands. “Is there somewhere we can go to talk?”

Romero leads them to a conference room deeper in the building, stopping only once by a scuffed coffee maker with a half-full pot sitting on the burner and a mismatched collection of mugs sitting nearby to ask if they want any. Theo refuses, initially, and then jumps when Liam pushes past him to pour a cup and—after adding two shakes of sugar from the shaker nearby—shoves it into his hands.

“You need it,” He mutters, and Theo’s prepared to be insulted before he catches the tight look on Liam’s face. Swallowing, he takes the mug and—ignoring Romero’s eagle-eyes clearly having caught the entire exchange—nods to her to show they’re ready to keep moving.

“Deputy Strauss said you’re a consultant?” Romero says to Liam as she’s closing the door to the conference room behind herself, Theo already sliding gratefully into one of the room’s chairs.

“Uh. Yeah,” Liam answers, his eyes flicking to Theo’s as he apparently catches the potential trap of Romero’s offhand question.

“Hmm,” Romero responds, shrugging, as she takes a seat across from Theo. “I would have guessed partner.”

Liam’s face goes scarlet, and Theo barely manages to clamp down on his own surprised blink; he takes a long drink of the coffee in his hands to hide his reaction before realizing—Romero’s eyes on his face, a small smile playing at her lips—that the coffee doesn’t actually help his or Liam’s case, here. Giving up, Theo drops the case files in his free hand onto the table with a deliberately loud thump and pushes them towards Romero with his fingertips.

“Noah Patrick, Beth Delattre, Nikos Belasko,” He says, and adds as Romero drops her own fingertips atop the folders to pull them towards herself, “They’re—”

“Not missing anymore?” Romero hazards dryly, flipping open the top folder to look down at Belasko’s autopsy photo—very intentionally showing only his head, and not the clawed-up mess of his torso from Kira’s Deputy War Chief Parrish putting the revenant down—as she does.

“That’s one way to put it,” Theo agrees, his tone just as desert-dry.

Romero spends a few minutes looking through the files—Tracy put them together, so Theo has zero concerns about them holding up to inspection—while Theo calmly drinks his coffee and Liam not-so-calmly vibrates with tension in his seat next to Theo. Theo’s beginning to think he should have roped someone else into playing his consultant—Derek, maybe, or hell, Cora—because Liam can’t act for shit, and Theo has to keep resisting the urge to lean over and put a hand on his shoulder, or arm, or his ceaselessly bouncing knee. As it is he just shoots Liam a pointed look, which causes Liam to scowl and stop fidgeting for, oh, maybe a whole ten seconds before he starts right back up again.

“You have a theory,” Romero predicts after she’s done skimming through Noah’s file, slipping her fingers underneath the cover to flip it back shut again. She looks at Theo expectantly and Theo steels himself, the real point of this visit kicking into high gear.

He nods towards Liam. “Mr. Dunbar here—” His tongue nearly trips over the casual title, too used to grinding out His Highness even spitting mad or helplessly amused, “—specializes in ritualistic serial killings. He thinks these fit a profile he’s aware of.”

Romero’s eyebrows shoot right back up. “Serial killings, huh?” She says, her tone carefully even.

“Not exactly the way anyone wants to start their morning, but yes,” Liam suddenly pipes up, and Theo’s head swivels around in surprise before he can stop himself, because Liam’s voice is suddenly butter-smooth and charmingly wry, the smile on his face invitingly crooked.

Romero squints at him suspiciously, but Liam had somehow managed to pair the sudden suaveness to his tone with his still-bouncing knee and general aura of restlessness, and it is—to Theo’s surprise just as much as Romero’s—effective; Romero’s shoulders relax, some. She glances between him and Theo—Theo carefully schooling his expression into a polite mask—and then frowns, the fingertips of one hand tracing absently over the file folder in front of her.

“So,” She finally says, tapping her fingers once on the file like punctuation and then looking back up at Theo. “Is this Special Crimes’ roundabout way of informing me you’re taking over my cases?”

“Actually,” Theo tells her, feeling a little zing of adrenaline go bolting up his spine as he does; here goes. “We were hoping we could partner up.”

---

By the time the three of them decamp to Theo’s truck to head back to Supernatural Division, Hayden—who’d rolled her eyes hard enough at Theo continuing to call her Deputy Romero that Theo had essentially been shamed into calling her by her first name—is clearly unimpressed with either Theo, Liam, or Supernatural-stroke-Special-Crimes Division.

“You know how it is,” Theo says, in response to another probing question from Hayden about why none of the files on the Dread Doctors were digitized, “bureaucracy, general human laziness. The eventual heat death of the universe.”

Both Hayden and Liam give him a strange look at that last one, but Theo’s distracted, squinting at the vents on either side of the steering wheel with his fingers absently resting on the hard plastic. There’s some strange smell coming from them, subtle but bothering Theo in some unspecific way, and he nearly asks Liam in the backseat if he can scent the air to try and figure out what it is before he remembers Hayden sitting next to him and eyeing him skeptically. Grimacing and straightening back up, Theo gets his truck started and gets them on the road, heading towards the highway and Supernatural Division nestled back at the edge of the county border.

He checks his phone at a stoplight to make sure that Tracy—along with her permanent-for-the-foreseeable-future bodyguard Cora—had managed to set up the room in the bowels of Supernatural Division where they stick non-Fae-aware officers and civilians when they nonetheless need to question or otherwise keep them sequestered behind the station’s protective magics. He gets an all-clear—or, well. What he really gets is three thumbs-up emojis and a picture of Cora demonstrably lounging back in the room’s chair in front of the piles of convincingly fake files Tracy had put together, which means Tracy is either actually handling the revelations re: her ancestry and target status well, or has gone too far in the opposite direction and is overcompensating in trying to convince everyone she is.

Theo sincerely hopes it’s the former, but considering his own steadily churning gut…well. He puts his phone away, his eyes reflexively flicking to the rearview mirror to where he can see Liam frowning at him, the line of his mouth tight.

(“None of you should leave,” Scott had argued, frustrated and forceful and still managing to radiate authority even with his riot of bed-head and plaid pajama bottoms.

“There are three other names on that list, Your Majesty,” Theo had countered shortly, his fingers clumsy with shock and exhaustion as he’d worked the laces on his boots. “We can’t just leave them unprotected. Not to mention we still have to find and stop the Dread Doctors.”

Scott’s jaw had been clenched, and clenched hard, when Theo had finally finished pulling on his shoes and had looked up at him. “None of you are going anywhere alone, then.” He’d said, and it’d almost been more of a threat. “You stay with one of my people at all times.”

“Fine,” Theo had agreed, ignoring the near-total rush of relief he’d felt as Cora had kicked her feet up and into Tracy’s lap at the kitchen table, as Mason had edged a little closer to Corey on the couch, as Argent and Kira had shrugged and kept right on strategizing with Josh at the kitchen counter.

As Liam had stepped up to Theo’s side, and offered him a hand to pull him back up onto his feet.)

They drive for another ten minutes or so, Hayden eventually shifting from peppering Theo with questions about the apparent failings of Supernatural Division’s filing procedures to peppering Liam with questions about the Dread Doctors themselves. Whatever worries Theo had been harboring about Liam putting his foot in his mouth dissipate quickly: Liam answers her inquiries easily, effortlessly weaving the Fae community’s knowledge of the Dread Doctors into a believable tale. Theo finds himself watching Liam in the rearview mirror more than is probably recommended given that he’s driving, curious and a little—surprised. Taken in even though he really, really knows better by Liam’s smooth delivery and charming presentation: His Highness, Fae Prince Dunbar, indeed.

And then he rolls his truck to a stop at the lonely little stop sign signaling the turn onto State Highway 32–god bless rural Californian highways—and frowns again, his attention drawn back to the vents. What is that goddamn smell? He finds himself thinking, and this time when he reaches forward to touch the vents his fingers come away covered in a fine purple powder.

Theo’s eyes widen and panic surges hard and fast through him.

“Liam,” He says, Liam’s name tripping instinctively off of his tongue, stripped free of its titles and professional distance by the absolute terror seizing Theo’s chest; Liam cuts himself off in the middle of whatever he’d been saying to Hayden and stares at him, clearly taken aback. “Liam, get out of the car.” Liam doesn’t move initially, his eyes frozen on Theo’s face, and then they flick down to Theo’s purple-stained fingertips and he sucks in a harsh breath and throws himself immediately for the door.

The door which doesn’t open.

“What’s going on?” Hayden demands, looking back and forth between them and then jumping and cursing before wedging herself back against the truck’s console with wide, alarmed eyes as Liam rams his shoulder against the back door, trying to break it open.

“Out,” Is all Theo can say, a pleading tone to his voice as he turns for his own door and tries the handle, which clicks uselessly but doesn’t move. “I will explain, I swear, but first we have to get out.” Hayden stares at him for a few seconds before making a harsh, frustrated noise and reaching for her own door handle.

The smell is overpowering, now, and there’s the slightest purple haze leaking in through the vents. Behind him, Theo can hear Liam starting to cough, can hear the way his breaths are starting to wheeze, and for a moment his panic nearly overtakes everything. But he gets it forcefully under control, and reaches for the gear shift and then his keys, throwing the truck into park and then killing the engine in a quick series of movements. The damage is done, though—the cab continues to fill with purple smoke.

“God damn it,” Theo swears, and reaches one hand up for the pendant around his neck and one hand down for his gun, fully prepared to shoot out his own goddamn windows.

And then someone orders, “Stop right there,” from outside his truck, and Theo looks up and out through his windshield, and directly down the barrel of the shotgun that Kate Argent is pointing at his head.

“What the fuck,” Theo hears Hayden whisper beside him, but he’s frozen staring at Kate’s self-satisfied smile, at the way the afternoon sunlight is gleaming off of the shotgun’s matte black finish.

“Hands up and away from that charming pendant of yours, Agent Raeken,” Kate continues, gesturing a little with the gun in her hands. “This is between us, no need to involve the rest of your colleagues.”

Behind Theo, Liam wheezes out Kate’s name, clearly trying for a threat that gets lost entirely in the horrific, wet hacking that follows; Theo can see blood on Liam’s lips when he flicks his eyes up to the mirror.

“Agent Raeken,” Kate repeats, her tone going harsher and—and the barrel of her gun moving from Theo to Hayden, who freezes. Swallowing, Theo lets his hands drift slowly up into the air, away from his gun and his pendant; Kate’s smile goes liquid and pleased. “Good boy.”

“You’re going to kill him,” Theo warns as calmly as he can, his eyes fixed on Kate but his ears straining back towards Liam; towards where he can hear Liam struggling for every too-shallow, rasping breath. Beside him, he can see Hayden fighting the urge to look back at Liam, too, her training keeping her eyes locked on Kate, just like Theo’s.

“Nah,” Kate disagrees; her gun stays steady even as her smile widens. “As attractive a corpse as I’m sure he’d make, that’s not his role in all this.”

Theo feels his brow furrow as he stares at her, desperately trying to figure out what the hell she could possibly mean, but his thoughts are slow, sluggish, and getting steadily more syrupy with every breath. There’s something besides wolfsbane in the air, Theo realizes in horror; whatever Kate had done to his truck, her goal hadn’t been just to incapacitate Liam. Hayden’s eyelids are fluttering, Theo can see them out of the corner of his eye, her head starting to dip and weave as whatever other drug Kate had mixed in with the wolfsbane she’d planted began affecting her.

Theo grits his teeth, trying to marshall his thoughts into some kind of order; trying to think past the insidious grip of the drug he can feel taking hold. “Whatever you’re planning, it isn’t going to work.” He manages, his own eyelids heavy and helplessly falling as he tries to keep them open, but Kate just laughs.

She laughs, and she does it right by Theo’s door: when the hell did she get there? Theo blinks sluggishly and tries to focus on her—and focus on the imposing figure now standing silent and looming just behind her—but she won’t resolve into anything but triplicates. He blinks again, and suddenly he’s looking at her straight-on, Kate having opened up his door—whatever had been holding it shut apparently gone, now—and she smiles, and catches him when he sags helplessly sideways. Head flopping backwards as Kate gets her hands under his arms—her shotgun slung carelessly across her back, now—and starts dragging him out of the truck, he can see Hayden passed out against the passenger side door, can see Liam staring helplessly at him half-collapsed across the middle console, one arm outstretched towards him and black blood covering his chin, the veins under the skin of his face gone a sickly, stark gray.

“You might be right, Agent Raeken,” Kate finally answers, after she’s laid him flat on the asphalt and crouched by his head.

The figure that’d been behind her—the goddamn Pathologist, Theo realizes with another shock of panic—lurches towards the truck, and Theo makes a helpless noise that Kate shushes, running her hand down his face.

“You might be right,” She repeats gently, and then she grins, fierce, and grips his chin in a tight, harsh hold to make him look at her. “But you know, I think what I’m planning just might work after all.”

And then she clenches a hand in his hair, and slams his head back against the asphalt, and Theo goes out like a light.

---

He wakes up strapped down to some kind of operating chair.

He jerks hard and almost immediately swears, his head one massive, throbbing ache, and tries to bring a hand up to press against the center of the pain at the back of his skull only to find that he can’t, because there are thick, padded medical cuffs wrapped tight around his wrists and secured to the sides of the chair. Theo stares at them wide-eyed and panting for a few uncomprehending seconds, and then his head whips up when he hears a bitten-off, hurt sound, and he finds himself staring at Hayden instead.

Except she isn’t looking at him, or even at her own trapped wrists in her own operating chair. She’s looking across the room at something else, horror and disgust all over her face, and Theo feels his breath catch as intuition flares hard and painful in his gut. Craning his neck back and around, he just barely manages to look at the other end of the room, and instantly makes his own harsh, wounded sound.

“Oh good, you’re awake,” Kate muses, apparently hearing him.

She doesn’t look back at him as she says it, though, her attention still on Liam in front of her and just barely on his feet, his toes just barely brushing the ground from his arms suspended above his head with chains threaded through with—with car engine jumper cables. Theo stares at him, heedless of the painful throb of his neck from his contorted position. He stares at Liam’s squeezed-shut eyes and his tightly clenched teeth, at the way he has his fingers wrapped around the chains to try and support his weight, as useless as the effort is turning out to be; every few seconds, his barely touching toes slip and he collapses heavily, the chains pulling his arms painfully taut until he can scramble his legs weakly back underneath himself.

Jesus christ, Theo finds himself thinking, horror blooming thick and near-overwhelming in his mind. Closing his eyes for a brief second—even as a corner of his mind is shrieking not to, that he has to keep looking; that he can’t leave Liam alone in this—he relaxes his neck to let his head fall heavily back down and forces himself to think. Opening his eyes back up, he finds himself looking at Hayden, who’s looking back, now, her eyes wide and confused but bright with focus, and determination. Theo swallows.

He swallows, and then his attention is caught by a quick gleam of metal reflecting off of the room’s dull lighting from a dusty table next to Hayden’s chair, and his eyes go wide. Hayden must catch the change in his demeanor because she looks down too, and then her brow furrows as she looks back up at Theo and away from his pendant lying abandoned and innocuous next to her.

Break it, Theo mouths as she meets his eyes, hope surging through his chest. His flicks his gaze between Hayden’s and the pendant a few more times, and then again mouths break it as he mimes crushing the pendant in his strapped-down fist. Hayden’s eyes narrow as she apparently catches on, though Theo can see her willingness to suspend her disbelief warring with her better sense as she no doubt wonders how destroying a piece of jewelry is going to help them. But then her mouth tightens into a determined twist, and she gives him a short, sharp nod.

And then Theo is out of time to watch and try to help, because Kate has apparently grown bored of watching Liam’s ongoing torture and starts walking towards him.

“Welcome back, Agent Raeken,” Kate greets as she comes to a stop in front of his chair, a self-satisfied smile on her face. “For a little while there I was worried you were going to sleep through this historic day.”

“Historic day,” Theo repeats, incredulous and sneering; forcing calm and composure into his voice where he really doesn’t feel it. “Christ, you’re worse than Valack.”

Kate smirks, the sly expression on her face making it clear that she knows exactly what he’s trying to do. “Valack, hmm? Interesting that you bring him up, considering it was your little visit to Eichen that necessitated all of this.”

She raises her arms to gesture around the room: at Theo in front of her, and Hayden behind her, and Liam back in the room’s corner; the harsh, painful rasp of his breathing audible even from where Theo’s trapped. Theo grits his teeth.

“Sounds like a pretty big fuck-up on your part,” Theo tells her, aiming for a particularly irritating blend of sneeringly satisfied and judgmental. But Kate just smiles benevolently.

“Well, I was counting on His Majesty McCall’s—” She turns Scott’s title into a mocking barb, “—distrust of Valack to keep him off the board. A failure of imagination on my part,” She concludes, faking graciousness as she does.

Theo just scoffs, and makes sure to keep his eyes fixed on Kate as he does it so that he doesn’t accidentally look at Hayden, still strapped down behind Kate but carefully maneuvering around to try and find some way to get at Theo’s pendant on the table next to her. Luckily for them both, Kate seems alternately focused on Theo in front of her and Liam off to her side, her gaze continually drifting that way every time Liam gives a particularly loud cry, or collapses in his chains and makes them rattle.

“But…” Kate finally continues, apparently picking back up on her former thought. “I was also counting on Supernatural Division having a slightly more sensible reaction to McCall’s attack on the station.” She cocks her head and studies Theo thoughtfully. “So I guess I overestimated you both.”

Theo bares his teeth at her in a vicious smile, and Kate laughs. She also starts to turn away, and Theo can’t have that; behind her, Theo can see that Hayden has managed to scoot her operating chair—the entire thing on wheels—a few degrees around so that it’s now angled towards the table on which Theo’s pendant is resting. Theo thinks fast.

“This whole thing seems a little over-elaborate, Councilwoman. You get bored of trying to ram speciest laws through committee?” Theo sneers, arranging his expression into something as disrespectful and mocking as he can.

Kate stops turning and tilts her head to smile wanly down at him. “Are you really going to try and pretend that you figured out my plan, Agent Raeken?”

“You think I haven’t?” Theo shoots back, and grins deliberately wide. “We nearly made off with one of your pets’ preferred targets, after all.”

Hayden freezes, apparently prepared for Kate to look back at her as the aforementioned target, but Kate just stares at Theo for a long moment and then bursts out laughing. Theo feels his expression fall in confusion, no matter how much he tries to keep it from showing on his face.

“Oh, Agent Raeken,” Kate replies pityingly, still laughing. “You still think the Doctors are serial killers, don’t you? You still think the killings are random.”

I’ve miscalculated, Theo finds himself thinking, his eyes locked helplessly with Kate’s as she smiles down at him. But she’s still looking at him at least, and not at Hayden, who’s renewed her silent, careful efforts to try and get herself in reach of Theo’s pendant.

“Well, in your defense,” Kate finally says musingly, “so did I, until a few months ago.”

“Oregon,” Theo breathes unthinkingly, that particular puzzle piece clicking into place.

Kate smirks, even as her eyes narrow. “Figured that out, did you? Or—” She pauses, and her expression briefly tightens, her smile becoming more of a snarl, “—or did my brother figure that out?”

Theo clamps his mouth shut, and says nothing. But that’s an answer in and of itself, and Kate huffs a harsh, not-particularly-amused laugh and shakes her head slightly.

“Him and Allison. They never could get their heads on straight, not after Victoria,” She murmurs, sounding bitter. Then her face brightens, and she refocuses on Theo as she says, “But it won’t matter, soon. Them, the cowards on the Council,” She stops, briefly, and reaches out to wrap her fingers around his chin, stroking a thumb over his jaw even as he tries—and fails—to yank his face away, “the do-nothing neutralists of Supernatural Division. None of you will have a choice.”

And then she releases him, and does turn away. Theo panics—and Hayden freezes—but Kate doesn’t turn towards Hayden, or even for Liam. She turns for another table that Theo can just barely see if he cranes his neck awkwardly back, her fingers reaching for a syringe full of some dully glowing liquid, the color an eerie, chemical yellow. No, Theo thinks, recognition twisting his gut as his eyes flick from the syringe to Liam. No, no, no.

“If they aren’t serial killers,” Theo blurts out desperately, yanking at his strapped down wrists out of a useless, desperate need to move, to get Kate’s attention back on him and away from the drug in the syringe: Supermoon Serum, a stupidly innocuous name for a drug that would mimic the full moon’s effect and turn Liam into a berserker mess, “if they killings aren’t random, then what are they?” Kate doesn’t pause, or look at him, so Theo grits his teeth and tries again, injecting as much contempt into his voice as he can as he says, “C’mon, Kate. I know you want to villain-monologue. You’re too obviously goddamn pleased with yourself.”

Kate laughs again, loud and ringing. But she does stop, and she does turn back towards Theo, the syringe left on the table. “My god, Agent Raeken. You really don’t have any sense of self-preservation, do you?”

Theo just smirks as obnoxiously as he can at her. “I think we both know that my number’s up, here, what with me being one of your pets’ preferred victims,” He says, and spots the surprise that flickers across her face as his cavalier attitude apparently catches her off-guard. What he isn’t expecting is to catch sight of Liam across the room, weakly lifting his head to stare at Theo in horror; Theo smothers a wince, but doesn’t stop. “So what’s the harm in bragging a little? You know you want to.”

Kate considers him for a long few seconds, her hip cocked against the edge of the table containing the syringe; Theo works his wrists against the padded edge of the cuffs and forces himself to consider her right back.

“They’re sacrifices, Agent Raeken,” Kate finally says. “They’ve always been sacrifices.”

Oh, Theo thinks, his stomach roiling unpleasantly as everything he knows of the Dread Doctors shifts sickeningly and clicks back into a new, more disturbing shape. Oh, god.

“It’s a spell,” He breathes. “They’re trying to complete a spell.”

“Got it in one,” Kate praises, her lips curled in a mocking smirk. And then she sighs a little and leans back, rolling her shoulders as she continues, “A spell whose proper ingredients they’ve been trying to figure out for the last two centuries, but which they were never going to finish finding without help.”

Theo’s confused. Clearly the Dread Doctors had figured out the proper kinds of ingredients—humans with Fae ancestors, horrifically enough—but then Kate reaches up and hooks two fingers in a chain around her neck, pulls something up and out from underneath her shirt. Theo stares at the large, heavy pendant that’s revealed, the silver mass of it dangling innocuously from Kate’s hand.

“Did you know,” Kate asks thoughtfully, “that it was an Argent who was the first Hunter?”

Theo did know that; the Argents took great pride in constantly reminding everyone of that fact. Or, Theo thinks, correcting himself—his mind’s eye pulling up Allison’s soft, regretful look, and Chris Argent’s brusque-but-protective demeanor—most of them did. But Kate’s not done with her history lesson.

“What about the first Argent Hunter’s first target, the one who started it all? Did they teach you that in the academy?” Kate wonders, and Theo feels his brow pull together as Kate’s soft, insinuating question triggers hazy, half-forgotten memories of hot afternoons sequestered away with a half-dozen other sleep-deprived Supernatural Division recruits.

And then he has it, and he can feel all the color drain from his face as he stares at Kate in a mixture of disbelief and absolute, cloying horror.

But Kate just smiles at him, sly and satisfied. “Say it, Agent Raeken.”

“The Beast,” He breathes, the tips of his fingers going numb in his shock. “The Beast of Gévaudan.”

Kate smiles wider and holds up the pendant dangling from her hand to study it thoughtfully. “Marie-Jeanne Argent, née Valet, killed the Beast of Gévaudan using a silver-tipped pike forged with Argent blood and blessed by her later-husband emissary, who called upon the magics of the twelve then-existing Fae bloodlines to help strengthen the weapon.”

As she says weapon, she twists her fingers to make the pendant in her hand swing, and Theo abruptly understands.

“That’s why you went to Oregon,” Theo realizes. “You went to get that.” He nods at the pendant; at the reforged Argent pike.

Kate shrugs, and drops the pendant so that it lands heavily on her chest. “And to perform the ritual that would call the Dread Doctors,” She agrees. “That one was a particular bitch. My great-grandfather’s notes were very unclear.”

I have my great-grandfather’s journals, Allison had said, a few days and what feels like a million years ago, you can read them if you like. She’d said it to try and make Theo understand why the Fae community would have hid the Dread Doctors from their human allies, but even without her help Theo had known: the Fae had hidden the Dread Doctors from the humans because their discovery would have started a war.

The very war that Kate Argent is determined to start.

“You should see your face, Argent Raeken,” Kate tells him, oil-slick smooth and so very pleased. And then she smiles, broad and laughing a little, and turns back to the table; to the syringe, and Liam still strung up behind her.

“You don’t just want a war,” Theo breathes, staring at her in horror. “If you wanted that you could have just taken your family’s evidence to the rest of the Council. You want—you want…”

He trails off, his gut and chest and mind a sickening mess. Revealing the existence of the Dread Doctors would have gotten Kate her war, but helping them resurrect the Beast—the deadliest Fae in recorded history, whose human victims had numbered in the hundreds—would get her something else.

“You want a genocide,” He realizes, his voice a horrified, blank rasp.

Kate doesn’t even try to demur, just picks up the syringe and taps it a few times, depresses the plunger to squeeze out any air bubbles. “And one kicked off not just by a rash of human murders—including several beloved Supernatural Division officers,” she says beloved with a particularly mocking twist to her lips, “but by the death of several humans at the hands of the deceptively noble Fae King, His Majesty Scott McCall.”

She stops for a moment to smirk at him, like they were sharing some kind of joke.

“You messed that part of my plan up pretty spectacularly,” She confesses to him, and then she pastes a patently stupid expression on her face as she repeats Theo’s own words from several days ago in a mocking jumble, “A big misunderstanding.” She snorts. “I should have known.”

Then her head tips up, apparently hearing something, her attention arrowing up and out towards what Theo sees, when he cranes his neck to follow her gaze, is the entrance into whatever room they’re in. And then his breath freezes in his chest, because the Dread Doctors—all of them, the Surgeon flanked on either side by the Pathologist and the Geneticist—come stalking into the room, their odd, jerky movements seeming even more sickeningly impossible in the dim lighting and with Theo’s unsettled, hurting everything.

Kate sees them and smiles. “But the number one rule of hunting is to always have a back-up plan,” She says, meeting Theo’s eyes when his gaze flicks reflexively back to her. She holds up the syringe and wiggles it a bit, and Theo jerks uselessly at his strapped-down wrists, his eyes flying automatically to Liam still strung up helplessly from the ceiling.

“Kate, don’t,” He snarls, except that it comes out uncomfortably close to begging as she starts walking towards Liam. “Kate!”

“Think of it this way, Agent Raeken,” Kate tells him as she stops in front of Liam and uses the side of the syringe to tip his exhaustedly-hanging head further to the side, Liam trying and failing to jerk his head away; it leaves the vein at the side of his neck exposed. She pauses and glances back at Theo; at where the Surgeon has stopped by Theo’s operating chair, Theo jolting and instinctively trying to recoil away. “At least you won’t be around to see His Highness, the lovable Fae Prince Dunbar—” She pauses and smiles slyly at Liam, “—turn himself into Public Enemy Number One.”

Theo’s focus is torn between Kate putting the needle of her syringe to Liam’s neck, and the Surgeon raising their own complicated looking syringe from their attack on Corey and Theo in the woods, one gloved hand rising towards Theo’s face. He makes a harsh, helpless noise as the Surgeon presses his head down and to the side, pinning it there as they place the tip of the needle against Theo’s neck.

Except that the angle of his head means he ends up looking directly at Hayden. Hayden who he’d all but forgotten about—Hayden who Kate had all but forgotten about—and who had apparently taken ruthless advantage of Theo’s and Kate’s unintentional preoccupation with each other to maneuver her body still strapped down in her operating chair so that her legs are pointed directly towards the table containing Theo’s pendant.

So that they’re pointed directly towards the table and then some, Hayden’s position giving her enough room so that she can raise one booted heel and—making desperate, determined eye contact with Theo—bring it down on Theo’s pendant with a loud, resounding crack.

---

The next thirty seconds just completely redefine the term shitshow.

Tracy, Josh, and Corey—along with, apparently, the lion’s share of Supernatural Division—must have been monitoring for his pendant, because the second it shatters under Hayden’s boot heel the air goes bright with several fast, blinding flashes of light as transportation spells take immediate effect and the room fills with people. And not just Supernatural Division officers, either—Tracy is flanked by Cora, Stiles, and Lydia, Josh by Chris Argent, Kira, and Derek, and Corey lands just behind Mason with his gun already out. As it is in the chaos Theo nearly misses Scott and Malia darting away from a wild-eyed Finstock, Allison at his side with a powerful-looking crossbow in her hands and her attention instantly zeroing in on Kate.

Theo makes a guttural, surprised noise and then another, more pained one as the Surgeon rips the needle back out of his neck, preoccupied now with fighting off Scott and Malia as they both lunge for the Surgeon’s hulking figure. Whipping his head up and around as soon as the threat of the needle is gone, Theo tries and mostly fails to get a handle on what’s happening, but there are too many people moving around too fast: he spots Cora and Derek fighting with the Pathologist, and Kira and Lydia forcing the Geneticist back, and back, and then he loses them.

He catches Allison’s and Chris Argent’s armed stand-off with Kate, though, at least until a blur of color barrels into the side of his operating chair.

“Tracy?” Theo gasps, looking down at her; Tracy gives him a grimace that may have had pretensions of being a smile and keeps working on undoing the cuff around his right wrist. Across the way, Josh is doing the same to Hayden’s.

And then Theo’s eyes widen and—giving a silent apology to Tracy—he reaches out with his newly-freed right hand and yanks her down and into him, the Pathologist’s glove just barely missing catching hold of the back of her neck. Tracy gives a loud, startled noise, muffled only a little by her face being unintentionally buried in Theo’s shoulder, and then Cora and Derek are there and dragging the Pathologist back and away from her.

“Help them!” Theo orders Tracy as she straightens. She hesitates, her eyes flicking to his still-restrained left wrist, and Theo shakes his head a little wildly. “I’ve got this, go!”

Tracy makes a harsh, unhappy sound and hesitates a little longer, and then she goes, her hands already making for her gun at her hip. Theo has to resist the urge to watch her and instead turns to start fighting with the cuff around his left wrist, his eyes desperately seeking out Liam.

Liam, and the thin trail of blood Theo can see trickling from the side of neck from where Kate had managed to get her needle in his neck before Hayden could break Theo’s pendant.

Cursing, Theo gets the cuff off his wrist and, trusting Josh to take care of Hayden and literally everyone else to take care of the Doctors and Kate, he throws himself off the operating chair and rushes towards Liam, dodging Mason as he takes several steps back, his hands lit up with magic, and nearly getting taken out by Scott as the Surgeon flings him backwards. But Scott finds his feet almost immediately, and so Theo keeps moving, until he reaches Liam’s side and can run frantic eyes over the chains-and-jumper-cables set-up he’s rigged to, trying to find the source of the electricity that he can, now that he’s this close, hear humming through the air.

He spots it: a car battery sitting on the floor. Grimacing and absently praying that he isn’t about to get his stupid ass killed anyway, Theo raises a foot and stomps on the join of the cables, yanking both off and away from the car battery with a wince-inducing shriek of metal-on-metal. Almost immediately the hum of electricity fades and Theo lurches forward, getting right up next to Liam now that he’s out of danger of being electrocuted by proximity to try and figure out how to get the chains off from around Liam’s wrists.

They’re hooked shut with a padlock, and Theo swears colorfully. Liam’s closed eyelids flutter at the noise, but he doesn’t react besides that, and Theo starts looking around frantically, trying to spot the key.

And then he swears again and catches Liam as he sags, the padlock coming undone by itself and the chains slithering immediately away from Liam’s wrists. Whipping his head around, Theo manages to lock eyes with Stiles—Stiles’ right arm outstretched towards him and Liam and his fingers still glowing faintly—for a brief second before Stiles has to refocus on helping Scott and Malia fight the Surgeon.

Dragging his attention back to Liam, Theo gets him lowered to the ground and starts looking him over, his eyes fixing almost instantly on the trail of blood now half-dried and starting to flake down Liam’s neck. But the needle mark when Theo gets Liam’s head gently tilted to the side and runs his thumb carefully over the injection sight is healed, and Theo breathes out a sigh of relief. And then his breath freezes right back up in his chest when Liam brings up a hand to grab his wrist, holding it fast.

Liam blinks open gold-flared eyes, his fingertips—his clawed fingertips—tightening briefly around Theo’s wrist as he looks hazily up at him. “You’re a fucking moron,” Liam breathes around a mouthful of fangs. “What if she’d actually managed to fully inject me, you idiot?”

Theo stares at him for a moment, and then he laughs, helpless and more than a little hysterical as he collapses back down onto his heels and then half on top of Liam, Theo’s hip digging into the flesh of Liam’s stomach.

“You’re welcome,” He answers, and then he looks up, blinking, into the sudden hush of the room.

Scott and Malia are standing panting over the unnaturally still body of the Surgeon, and Cora and Derek are doing the same over the Pathologist. Kira is just sliding her katana free of the Geneticist’s stomach, the blazing-kitsune glow of her just starting to fade. Tracy and Corey are stood back by Mason, Lydia, and Stiles, and Josh has one arm around Hayden’s waist to help keep her on her feet, the both of them leaning heavily back against the operating chair that Josh had freed her from.

But it’s Allison and Chris Argent who catch and hold Theo’s attention, the both of them stood with their weapons, crossbow and shotgun both, trained on Kate, stood opposite them with her hands up and a fierce, defiant snarl on her face.

“It’s over, Kate,” Argent tells her, harsh and blunt, and Kate just smiles, though there’s nothing warm about the twist to her lips as she opens her mouth to respond.

But whatever Kate may or may not have been about to say, it gets drowned out by someone suddenly shrieking, “Raeken!”

Theo winces, and sags a little harder against Liam, who presses back just as hard and apparently just as helplessly. “Yes, Captain?” Theo ventures, forcing his eyes up and towards Finstock stood in the middle of the room with his hair and eyes and mouth wild.

Finstock stares back at him for a few long, long seconds, and then he gestures around to the absolute disaster of the room: the apparently-dead two-century old serial killers, the bloodied Fae royal court, and half of Supernatural division all crammed into the too-small space. He stares back at Theo, and then he sucks in a deep breath—Theo preemptively bracing himself—and hollers:

“What the hell haven’t you been telling me?!”

---

Six months later, Theo comes back upstairs into Supernatural Division’s main bullpen area after his latest interrogation and finds Liam sitting in his chair, Liam’s feet kicked up on his desk and his attention on his phone in his lap.

“Hey,” He greets as Theo’s shadow falls across him and he looks up, still clearly half-distracted. “They tell you where the Supermoon Serum is coming from?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Theo answers replies automatically, rotely; well-trained by Stiles at this point.

Liam rolls his eyes and lets it go, clearly resolved to bribe Josh into telling him later. He also almost instantly goes back to staring down at the blank screen of his locked phone in his lap, his fingers playing along the edge of the case but making no move to activate it. It’s only then that Theo fully clocks the shadowbox beneath it, and Theo rolls his eyes, reaching forward to yank the framed medal out from underneath Liam’s hands so that he can open his top desk drawer and shove it back inside.

“Hey!” Liam protests, dropping his legs and scrambling forward so he can open the drawer back up and retrieve the medal. He glares at Theo when Theo tries to take it from him again, and very deliberately opens up the base of the frame so that he can prop the medal up by Theo’s keyboard.

“Liam,” Theo huffs, annoyed, but Liam just speaks over him.

“I don’t know what your damage is,” He says, deliberately over-loud. “Tracy and Josh and Corey and Hayden don’t have any problem displaying the medals the Council gave them for their services during the Dread Doctors investigation.”

“Josh is an attention-whore and Mason got Corey’s specially framed for him, it has literally nothing to do with the medal itself,” Theo counters, and makes another grab for the frame.

Liam intercepts him. “And Tracy and Hayden?”

“Maybe they think they look nice, I don’t know,” Theo answers, and then gives up on trying to grab the medal; he’ll wait until the next time he’s at his desk alone and stick it back in his drawer. Liam side-eyes him like he knows exactly what Theo is thinking. Trying to distract him, Theo nods down at Liam’s phone still in his lap. “What were you looking at, anyway?”

“Oh,” Liam says, their brief scuffle over Theo’s medal forgotten. He leans back and reaches for his phone, unlocking it and holding the screen up for Theo’s inspection; Theo’s eyes catch on the headline of the displayed news article. “They announced Kate’s trial date. It’s in a few months.” He must catch the look on Theo’s face, because he huffs a sound and observes, “Which you clearly already knew.”

Theo shrugs, because there’s not much else to say. “You’ll have to testify,” He points out.

Liam’s mouth just goes hard. “Happily,” He says, his voice hard.

Grimacing, and wanting that look off Liam’s face—wanting the slightly goofy, outraged expression he’d been wearing when he’d been trying to defend Theo’s own medal from Theo’s own exasperation—Theo leans down and kisses him, bracing his hands on the armrests of his chair on either side of Liam’s chest. Liam jumps some in surprise, clearly have been pretty deep in his own head, and then he hums and tilts his head up and to the side for a better angle, kisses Theo back.

And then he jolts and flails—Theo jerking backwards in equal surprise—when Finstock suddenly yells from his office across the room: “Raeken! Your Highness! Not in my goddamn station, no matter how sickeningly sweet your star-crossed romance is!”

Liam’s poleaxed expression is almost one-hundred percent worth it, even given the amused snickering of the rest of the station.

Huffing out a quiet, involuntary laugh, Theo straightens back up, his mind already running through his mental to-do list of things he needs to do before he and Liam can head out, and then he jumps about a mile in the air when Finstock suddenly appears by his side, a riotous sprawl of leaves and impressively large fronds in his arms that he shoves into Theo’s chest.

“This is for the newly-minted Councilwoman Argent,” Finstock tells him, though the way he barks it, it’s almost more of an order. “Don’t congratulate her for me or anything, I like my job.”

“Right,” Theo says, through a mouthful of leaves. “Got it.”

He and Liam are clearly some of the last people to arrive at Allison’s, and Theo has to park a block over. Grimacing and forcefully pretending that the Permit Parking Only sign five feet in front of his truck doesn’t exist, Theo turns off the engine and is turning around to retrieve Finstock’s ridiculous gift of a fern when he catches sight of the shit-eating expression on Liam’s face from his passenger seat.

“You can write yourself a ticket if it’ll make you feel better, Agent Raeken,” He says, tongue so firmly in his cheek Theo’s surprised it hasn’t burrowed out the other side.

“Shut up,” Theo mutters, cheeks flushing, and shoves the plant into Liam’s arms instead.

The front door is unlocked when they make it to the house, a gaudy and clearly homemade banner with Congratulations Councilwoman Argent! scrawled across it in uneven, glittery block capitals hanging over the door; Theo wonders how much it’s costing Lydia to leave the monstrosity of it up and undisturbed. Liam is clearly thinking the same thing as he gets the front door open and leads Theo through it, the grin on his face—visible even through the leaves of Finstock’s ridiculous plant—wide and the corners of eyes crinkled as he looks back at Theo.

They drop Finstock’s fern and their own gifts—Theo’s a tasteful, framed copy of the Inter-Species Law and Peace Treaty of 1837, and Liam’s a ridiculous basket full of stuffed wolves and coyotes and foxes and other animals representing Fae species, along with several pop culture characters (“Stiles is the Red Witch, see!” Liam had said, and proceeded to ignore Theo pointing out that Stiles would absolutely love that)—off at the dining room table, slotting them in among the items already there.

(“Unrecognizable,” Allison had said bluntly, stood on a table half-drunk and solemn with her upraised strawberry daiquiri in one hand after the ballot results had finished coming in, and the noise level in the McCall house from all the cheering had died down to a dull roar. “I want my new office—” Kate’s old office, “—to be unrecognizable.”)

The party is in full-swing in the backyard, and Theo heads out into the middle of the chaos while Liam detours briefly to the kitchen to get them drinks. Tracy spots him coming first and waves enthusiastically but doesn’t bother to get up, her back to Cora’s chest in their shared lawn chair and Cora’s arm slung around her waist; Theo laughs quietly and waves back, returning Cora’s acknowledging nod as he does. Over in the grass, Hayden and Josh are apparently kicking Stiles’ and Derek’s asses at cornhole, the two of them nearly sending a fountain of beer up into the air as Hayden nails a particularly tricky shot and they both throw their arms up, taking their bottles of beer with them. Corey and Mason—apparently on-deck to face the winners—lean back out of the splash zone, laughing loudly.

“Hey Theo!” Theo looks up as Scott calls his name, and then reaches out to take the hand Scott offers him before leaning into the quick embrace that Scott‘s outstretched arm requests. Scott leans back afterwards and grins at him. “Kira and Cora have more info for you on those serum dealers you were looking for, they think they’ve found their base of operations.”

“Wait, really?” Theo exclaims, and Scott grins and waves Kira and Cora over, Cora grumbling unhappily about it and dragging a grinning Tracy with her.

Scott eventually wanders off to go argue with Chris Argent and Lydia about proper grilling technique, leaving Theo, Kira, Cora, and Tracy still talking shop. Liam initially joins them to hand Theo his drink and then almost immediately gets bored and goes to join Malia hovering pointedly by the grill instead, where she’s been carefully sneaking individual hot dogs and slices of grilled vegetables off the grill when Argent, Lydia, and Scott aren’t looking. Liam isn’t nearly as successful as she’d been, though; Theo snorts as Liam just barely manages to dodge getting slapped on the back of his sneaking hand by the metal spatula Lydia’s holding, and then he leaves Liam to his fate and heads back inside to go grab another beer.

He runs into Allison just coming down the stairs. He’s about to say congratulations, Councilwoman, when he spots the tight look on her face and stops himself. She must catch his sudden hesitation, because she smiles ruefully and shakes her head, holding up her phone demonstratively.

“The Argent family lawyer,” She explains. “He wants me testify as a character witness on Kate’s behalf.”

Theo tries to think of something to say and can’t, and knows that his failure to do so is all over his face. But Allison just smiles more naturally this time and passes by him on her way towards the cooler shoved into the back corner of the kitchen, leaning down to pop the lid and pull out two beers from the mounds of ice and bottles inside. She straightens back up and snags the bottle opener sitting on the counter nearby before popping the tops with practiced ease and holding one out towards him, keeping the other and taking a drink even as Theo reaches out and accepts the one she’s offering.

“I’m sorry,” He finally says, and means it. He considers his words for a few seconds and then tells her quietly, “Whatever else she ended up being, she was your aunt first.”

“I think she was probably already whatever else she ended up being before she was my aunt, but.” She smiles gently at him to remove any sting, and then sighs. “Her and my grandfather always were a little too obsessed with the Argent family origins. We hunt those who hunt us.” She shakes her head, her expression tight. “They never could seem to get past it.”

Theo watches her for a few seconds, and then says, “You did,” softly, and meets her eyes when she looks over at him in surprise.

Allison considers him, her sharp eyes on his face, and this time when she smiles the tension is gone from the corners of her lips. “A pro-Fae Argent on the Council. I guess it’s a brave new world.”

Theo grins back, and turns his head some so that he can look out the kitchen window into the backyard, where he can see Liam now running cackling away from the grill with Scott hot on his heels; where he can see the rest of the Fae royal court laughing and cheering, Tracy and Josh and Corey and Hayden dotted in-between. He feels his own lips pull into an even wider smile, his mind pulling up the echo of Liam’s own statement back in the thick of the mess of the Dread Doctors, stood in this same kitchen and trying to convince Theo that Fae-human relations were good, that it was thanks to this new world, and he can’t help the quiet laugh that escapes his lips.

“Yeah,” He says, and takes a long drink of his beer before tipping his head sideways to meet Allison’s easy eyes. “Yeah, I guess it is.”