He didn't get back up.
That was the thing Eliza kept returning to as she crouched beside him on the gravel, her hand on his shoulder, the dark of the driveway pressing in around them. Derek Hale, who had walked into the Ironwood prepared for ambush and fought off two armed men while bleeding wolfsbane into his bloodstream, did not get back up.
"Derek." Her voice came out quieter than she intended. She put more weight behind it. "Derek."
His eyes were open. That was something. He looked up at the sky with the blank, slightly arrested expression of a man who was working very hard at a thing that should not have required work. She could feel it in his signature — the slow, labored quality to it, the way it guttered at the edges when it should have been steady. She had done that. She had put her hands inside the particular machinery of him and taken what she needed, and this was the result, and she needed to not think about that right now because there were more immediate problems.
She stood and looked at the castle. Every window dark.
"Peter." Nothing. She raised her voice. "Peter."
A light came on in the upstairs hall.
He appeared in the doorway still fully dressed, which was either a testament to his habits or a sign that he'd been listening for precisely this. Eliza decided not to examine the question too closely.
He took in the scene with the unhurried precision of someone performing a very quick calculation. His eyes moved from Derek on the ground to Eliza standing over him, and then back to Derek.
"How long."
It wasn't quite a question. She answered it anyway.
"Forty minutes. Since the car. I thought it was the wolfsbane — the knives were laced, and the wound was bleeding black on the drive back, and I thought that was — " She stopped herself. "I thought that was what it was."
"It's not the wolfsbane." He came down the steps and crouched beside Derek, one hand going to the back of his neck in a way that was too practiced to be casual. He pressed two fingers to the pulse point there, and whatever he found made his expression shift in some minute and unreadable direction.
Then he looked at Derek directly. "Can you stand?"
Derek said, to the sky, "Give me a minute."
"You have thirty seconds before I do this in a way that's undignified for both of us."
A beat. Then Derek said, "Help me up."
The sitting room on the ground floor was the nearest with a couch long enough. Peter arranged Derek on it with the brisk efficiency of someone who had done this before — more than once, Eliza suspected, and under conditions worse than these — and then turned back to her. The lamp in the corner threw a low, amber light across the room. In it, Derek looked worse than he had in the dark.
"You ran into hunters," Peter said.
"Mercenaries." She crossed her arms over her chest, not for warmth. "Lucien hired them. I had a vision after I —" She stopped. Started again. "I had to draw from Derek to gain enough power to fight them all off at once. There were four of them, and two of them had electrical rods, and —"
"And my nephew was already on the floor." Peter looked at her steadily. Then he looked at Derek. Then back at her. Some private arithmetic passed across his face and resolved itself into something settled.
"Right," he said. "We need Sylvia."
He left the room, phone already in hand.
She stayed.
She wasn't certain what prompted it — the practical calculation that someone should remain with him, or something less practical that she was not going to name while the room was this quiet and he was lying there looking at the ceiling with his jaw set in that particular way that meant he was refusing to acknowledge that he was in pain.
"Can I see?"
He didn't answer immediately, which she took for permission. She sat on the edge of the coffee table and looked at the knife wound at his side, where the fabric of his shirt had darkened through. She lifted the hem carefully. The blood was black and sluggish. The wound sat perfectly open, with no sign of the slow knitting she had seen werewolf injuries perform. As if the body had simply declined to participate.
She set the fabric back down.
"It's not healing," she said.
"I know."
"The blood is —"
"I know what the blood looks like." He said it without sharpness. As if he had said some version of it before and it had ceased to carry the weight it once did. "I've survived worse."
She looked at him. At the line of his jaw and the careful, controlled quality of his breathing — measured, deliberate, the breathing of someone who had learned to keep pain small through sheer practice.
"I don't doubt that," she said.
Sylvia and Deaton arrived just over an hour later. Deaton let himself in with the quiet authority of someone who had earned standing access, and Sylvia came through behind him with her coat still on and her eyes already moving across Derek with the assessing focus of a woman who had walked into rooms like this one before and understood that there was not time for preamble.
Peter stood in the doorway with his arms folded.
Eliza had not moved from the coffee table.
Sylvia looked at her first. That was the thing she noticed — not at Derek, not at the wound, but at her. As if the most relevant information in the room was whatever was currently happening on Eliza's face.
"Sit down properly," she said. "You're coiled."
Eliza sat.
"Tell me what you did."
"I drew from him. In the Ironwood — there were four mercenaries, and I needed the power —"
"I know what you did. Tell me how it felt."
Eliza paused. The question was not the one she had been prepared for.
"Like opening a door," she said, after a moment. "Like stepping through something that was already there."
Sylvia nodded, as if this confirmed something she already knew. She crossed the room and pressed her fingers to Derek's wrist in the same place Peter had, and kept them there for a breath, two, three.
"Your gift is bidirectional," she said. "You know how to extract. What you don't know yet — what Lucien made sure you never learned — is how to give it back."
"Can I reverse what I took?" Eliza asked.
"You can replenish his reserves. That should trigger his healing." Sylvia moved back and gestured at the couch. "Sit beside him. Take his hands."
She did not know what she expected.
Derek's hands were large and warm and they sat in hers with a kind of unself-conscious weight — not gripping, not limp, simply present. He turned his head and looked at her. She looked back. It was not a comfortable look exactly, but it was steady, and she found that she did not want to be the first one to break it.
"Close your eyes," Sylvia said.
She closed them.
"Your gift knows one direction. What I need you to do is imagine the same door — the same threshold — but reversed. You step back through instead of forward. You return what you borrowed."
"I didn't borrow it. I took it."
"Then give it back."
The silence in the room was very complete. Eliza could feel the low warmth coming from Derek's hands and, beneath the surface of it, the shape of his signature — depleted, flickering, like a fire burning too low. She had done this. She had reached into the particular engine of him and helped herself, and she was sitting here now with his hands in hers because of it.
She found the door. She stepped back through it.
It was harder than she expected. The extraction had been instinctive — urgent, thoughtless, the power moving toward the source of need before she had made any decision at all. This was different. This required intention. A precise and deliberate reversal of something her gift understood only as appetite, and she had to hold it in the opposite direction through sheer will, like pouring something uphill.
But it moved.
She could feel it, the slow reluctant flow of it — outward, returning, settling back into the place she had taken it from. She felt his hands tighten almost imperceptibly around hers. Just barely. The way a person tightens their hold when something that had stopped becomes possible again.
She opened her eyes.
The wound was no longer bleeding.
"I didn't know it could do that," she said.
"Lucien needed you extractive." Sylvia was already pulling her coat back on, her voice matter-of-fact and not unkind. "A gift that gives back is a gift with a conscience. That's inconvenient when someone requires a weapon."
Peter, from the doorway: "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Lucien very nearly repossessed his weapon tonight. He likely would have, had Eliza not nearly killed my nephew in the process of preventing it. Good intentions aside."
"We're all grateful for the context, Peter," Deaton said, in a tone that was not particularly grateful. He looked at Eliza, then at Derek. "I've called Scott. Tonight, we rest. There will be a great deal to discuss in the morning, and that conversation will go better for everyone if it happens when you're both capable of having it."
He moved toward the door. Sylvia paused at the threshold.
"Give your gift time," she said. "It learned one direction over eight years. It will need to relearn itself." She looked at Eliza directly, and her expression held the particular warmth she kept at a distance but did not withhold entirely — present but undramatic, the warmth of a woman who said things once and trusted them to land. "But it will remember. It already did tonight."
She left. Deaton pulled the door closed behind them.
The room went quiet.
Peter lingered for a moment in the doorway — just long enough to make it clear he was choosing not to stay — and then he was gone too, his footsteps disappearing up the stairs with an unhurriedness that managed to suggest both tact and the pointed absence of it.
She and Derek were alone.
He was looking at the ceiling again. His breathing had changed — steadier now, longer, the controlled quality gone because it was no longer necessary. She could feel the difference in his signature, the specific quality of warmth returning to it. Like something that had gone very dim coming back to its ordinary temperature.
She did not say anything for a moment. Neither did he.
Then he said, "Thank you."
"You don't need to."
"Eliza —"
"You don't need to thank me for fixing what I did to you." She said it plainly, without self-recrimination. It was simply true, and she had no interest in performing contrition for its own sake. She had done what she had to do, and she had fixed what she had broken, and they were both in the same room afterward. That was where they were.
She stood. Looked down at him for a moment — at the long, still shape of him on the couch, the color coming slowly back into his face. She reached out and turned off the lamp.
The room went dark. The window let in enough from the grounds to see the edges of things.
"Goodnight, Derek," she said.
She walked back to her room, and she did not let herself think about the warmth of his hands until she was already through the door.