Chapter 33: The Argent Daughter
[Beacon Hills High School — Monday, October 31, 2011, 7:55 AM]
Allison Argent was waiting at Jackson's locker.
Not the way Danny had waited — standing straight, patient, decided. Allison leaned against the metal with her arms crossed and her jaw set, the posture of a person who'd spent the weekend assembling questions from pieces her father had dropped. She wore all black — Halloween or coincidence, Jackson couldn't tell, but the effect was specific: a girl who looked like she was dressing for the role she was growing into.
"We need to talk," Allison said.
Jackson opened the locker. The motion bought two seconds of processing time — locker combination, books for first period, the familiar weight of the backpack settling onto his right shoulder. His chimera senses read the hallway: thirty students in visual range, none within earshot. Allison's heart rate was elevated — anger, not fear. Her scent carried the metallic edge of adrenaline and something Jackson's wolf nose classified as leather polish and gun oil, faint but present, the residue of a household where weapons were being discussed openly for the first time.
"About what?"
"About my father." Allison's voice was controlled. Steady in a way that was new — two months ago, Allison Argent had been the friendly new girl with dimples and a laugh that made Scott McCall's eyes go soft. The girl at Jackson's locker didn't have dimples today. "He's been having meetings. Late at night. He's been — he's cleaning guns I didn't know we had. He told my mother that Kate did something. He won't say what."
She's putting it together. Chris gave her pieces — the fire, Kate's involvement, the hunter heritage — and Allison is doing what Allison Argent always does: processing, categorizing, building the picture from fragments. In the show, this happened after Victoria's death, after Gerard's manipulation, under conditions of grief and rage. Here it's happening earlier, cleaner, driven by curiosity instead of trauma. Different foundation. Same trajectory.
"And you're asking me because—"
"Because he talks to you." Allison's eyes were steady. Brown, direct, the eyes of a girl who'd been training with a bow since she was twelve and was discovering that the training had a purpose no one had explained. "I know he meets with you. Don't deny it — I saw his call log. Your number. Three times in the last two weeks."
Jackson closed the locker. The hallway was thinning — first bell in four minutes. Students flowing toward classrooms, the tide of a Monday morning pulling bodies through doorways. A boy in a Scooby-Doo costume walked past. A girl dressed as a cat. Halloween at Beacon Hills High, and the real monsters were having a conversation at the lockers.
"Allison." He chose the tone carefully — not dismissive, not evasive, but direct. The register he'd used with Danny, with Lydia, with every person who'd pushed against the wall of his secrets. "I can't answer what you're asking. Not because I don't want to. Because it's not my information to share."
"Then whose is it?"
"Your father's."
The words landed. Allison absorbed them the way she absorbed everything — rapidly, completely, with the particular efficiency of a mind that was accustomed to processing complex information and filing it into usable categories. Her expression didn't change, but her body shifted — the arms tightened across her chest, the weight transferred to her back foot, the posture of someone who'd received confirmation of something she'd already suspected.
"He said I should talk to him. You're saying the same thing." Her voice carried a note that hadn't been there before — not anger, hurt. The particular hurt of someone discovering that the adults in her life had been operating from a shared playbook she wasn't included in. "Everybody tells me to talk to my dad. Nobody tells me the truth."
"Your dad will tell you the truth. Or as much of it as he thinks you're ready for."
"And what about the parts he doesn't think I'm ready for?"
Jackson looked at her. Allison Argent — sixteen, athletic, intelligent, the daughter of a hunter and the granddaughter of a monster. In the show, she became one of the most dangerous fighters in Beacon Hills. She established a new code. She died protecting her friends. And the path from the girl at the locker to the warrior with the silver arrowheads ran through exactly this kind of moment: the first time someone told her the world was bigger and darker than she'd been allowed to see.
"You'll figure those parts out yourself. You're smart enough."
And that's the problem. I just told Allison Argent to go be smart about the supernatural, the same way I pointed Chris at Kate. The butterfly wing beats and the hurricane forms. Allison will ask Chris. Chris, now allied with me and managing Kate's custody, will decide she's old enough for a version of the truth. He'll tell her about the fire. About Kate. About the family business. He won't say werewolves — not yet, not directly — but he'll give her the frame, and Allison will fill in the picture herself because that's what Allison does.
And I just accelerated it. Again.
Allison pushed off the locker. She didn't walk away angry — she walked away decided, which was worse. Angry could cool down. Decided meant the next step was already chosen.
"Thanks for nothing," she said over her shoulder. The words were casual. The tone wasn't.
---
[BHHS Cafeteria — 12:30 PM]
Scott was waiting at the lunch table.
Not Jackson's table — Scott's, the one near the vending machines where Scott and Stiles had been sitting since freshman year. Scott gestured Jackson over with a nod that carried concern instead of his usual easy warmth.
"Allison didn't sit with me at lunch," Scott said.
Jackson sat across from him. His tray was the usual chimera overload — two trays, technically, both stacked with food that would be gone in fifteen minutes. The empty seat where Danny used to sit was four tables away, visible from this angle, occupied by nobody. Three days and the absence still registered like a bruise.
"She talked to me this morning," Jackson said. "About Chris. About the meetings."
Scott's face did the thing it always did when Allison was involved — the concern deepened, the eyes softened, the entire emotional architecture of Scott McCall oriented around the girl he loved. Scott didn't guard his feelings. He wore them. The transparency that made him a terrible liar made him an extraordinary friend.
"She's been different." Scott kept his voice low. The cafeteria was loud — Halloween energy, students in costumes, someone playing a horror movie soundtrack from a phone speaker. Good cover for a conversation that shouldn't be overheard. "Since homecoming. Since Kate left. She's been... harder. Asking questions I can't answer without—" He gestured vaguely. Without revealing the supernatural was the subtext.
"I told her to ask Chris."
"You told— Jackson." Scott's voice carried the specific weight of a person who understood the implications faster than expected. "If she asks Chris, and Chris tells her about the family business, she'll—"
"She'll start becoming a hunter." Jackson said it flat. The reality of what he'd done — again, another butterfly, another wing beat — settled into the space between them. "She was always going to become a hunter, Scott. The question was never if. It was when and how."
"And you just answered when."
He's right. And he's smart enough to see it, which is why Scott McCall is more than the show's moral center — he's perceptive in ways that people mistake for naivety because he processes through feeling instead of calculation. Scott doesn't analyze. He knows. And right now he knows that I accelerated Allison's transformation, and he's not angry about it — he's grieving, preemptively, for the version of Allison that was still possible before this morning.
"I'm sorry." The apology was genuine. Not for the strategic decision — Allison learning the truth from Chris was better than learning it from Gerard, which was the alternative that Jackson's meta-knowledge screamed about. But for the cost. For what Scott was about to lose.
"Don't be sorry." Scott's jaw tightened. His eyes flickered — not gold, not shifted, but the emotional proximity to it. The wolf responding to pain. "Just... if she asks me about werewolves. About me. What do I say?"
"The truth."
"The truth could end us."
"The lie definitely will."
Scott stared at him. The cafeteria noise swirled around their table — laughter, chatter, the clatter of trays, a freshman screaming about something Halloween-related. The world operated at its normal volume. Two supernatural teenagers sat in the middle of it and discussed the approaching end of a relationship that one of them hadn't had the courage to fully start.
"She was reading something on her phone," Scott said. "In the parking lot. Before school. For like twenty minutes. Something long."
The Argent files. Chris gave her access. Or she found them — Allison Argent with a motive and a smartphone is a research engine that rivals Lydia's. She's reading about her family's history. The hunting lineage, the Code, the fire. She's building the identity that will carry her through the next year of her life, and she's doing it from the front seat of her car in a high school parking lot on Halloween.
Jackson ate. The food was fuel — the chimera metabolism demanded constant input, and the cafeteria's burgers and fries served the purpose without inspiring pleasure. His stomach processed while his mind cataloged the damage: Allison accelerated. Scott exposed. Chris's hand forced. Another butterfly, another ripple, another chain of consequences that couldn't be undone.
---
[BHHS Parking Lot — 3:20 PM]
Allison's car was still in the lot when Jackson walked out of the building. The engine was running. She sat in the driver's seat with her phone in both hands, reading with the focused intensity of someone constructing a new identity from documents she'd never been meant to see. Her face in the windshield was lit by the phone's glow — pale, sharp, the softness of the new girl evaporating as the Argent legacy settled into her bones.
She didn't look up as Jackson passed. She didn't need to. The conversation at the locker had been the last thing she needed from him. Everything else, she'd get from the family files, from the weapons in the basement, from the training that had always been play and was now revealed as preparation.
Scott stood by his bike at the far end of the lot. He watched Allison's car with the expression of a boy watching something precious change shape in front of him — not breaking, but becoming, and the becoming was taking her somewhere he couldn't follow without revealing the thing he'd been hiding since September.
I know what happens next. Chris tells Allison about hunters. Allison trains. She gets good — better than good, extraordinary. She develops skills with a bow, with ring daggers, with tactical thinking. And eventually, when Gerard arrives and offers her grief as fuel, she'll have the tools to become exactly the weapon he needs.
In the show, that sequence destroyed her. The grief was Victoria's death. The fuel was Gerard's manipulation. The result was a girl who pointed a crossbow at the boy she loved.
Here, the sequence starts without the grief. Allison isn't becoming a hunter because her mother died. She's becoming a hunter because she found out the truth and chose to engage. Different foundation. Same trajectory? Or different? The meta-knowledge says the outcome is similar. The butterfly says I can't be sure.
I've been sure about less and less since September.
He walked to the Porsche. The starter caught on the third try — worse today, the mechanical failure progressing — and he pulled out of the lot with Allison's car in his rearview mirror, still idling, still glowing with the light of a phone screen that was rewriting a girl's understanding of herself.
His own phone buzzed. Derek.
A text. Three words and a time:
Loft. Wednesday. 6.
And below it, an image — a whiteboard photographed at an angle, three names written in Derek's sharp handwriting:
Isaac Lahey. Erica Reyes. Vernon Boyd.
Jackson stared at the screen. Derek's pack expansion — the next phase, the Alpha building his numbers, reaching for the betas that would give him strength. Three names that Jackson knew from the show. Three teenagers whose lives were about to change the way his had, the way Scott's had, the way Allison's was changing right now in a parking lot.
Three more pieces on the board. Three more lives in his hands.
He pocketed the phone and drove toward home with three names and a Wednesday deadline and the Nemeton's pulse counting time beneath his ribs.
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