Title: To Serve a Great War
Fandom: Teen Wolf/Welcome to Night Vale
Rating: Gen
Length: 1300 words

She remembers months and months of being kept away from the moon, sitting next to Boyd in that bank vault and feeling her body ache for the lack of the tidal pull. Now when she blinks awake, Erica finds herself lying on her back and looking up a perfectly clear night sky. There are no clouds to hide her view of the stars, and the moon overhead is full and luminous. She feels no yearning for it at all. Erica blinks again and reaches for that sense of release that comes with letting herself be more visibly a wolf—the curving sharpness of claws and teeth—but she can't seem to find it.

It's not that Erica doesn't have experience with a body that won't do what it's told, but not like this. She inhales, not knowing if it's to scream or shout for help or to ward off a wave of fright, but her breath cuts off with a startled gasp when a face leans in over her, blocking out the moon.

"Well," the woman says, squinting down at Erica. Her round, dark face is framed by a halo of greying curls. "You're a new one. Haven't had one like you in a while."

"Where am I?" Erica asks, struggling to sit up, too panicked right now to care if the woman is a werewolf or a hunter or something else. Her muscles don't seem to work like she's expecting. "Boyd, where's—"

"Really," the woman continues, as if Erica hadn't spoken, "it's just not very good planning, is it? Or manners, that's what gets me the most. I'm not saying having an extra Erika or two around the house doesn't come in handy for chores and the like, but a head's up—it's the principle of the thing."

Erica's head feels strange, and when she finally manages to sit upright she has to close her eyes against the sudden rush of nausea and dizziness, like she's been lying down for a really long time. She can't understand anything the woman is saying. Her arms tremble as they brace her, the palms of her hands pressing down into what feels like fine, warm sand. "How long have I—"

"But I suppose that's just how things are where you're from," the woman continues. "Now there's a place that's confused about itself. You lose your Town Council in that nasty business with those hunters and then who's left in charge of teaching future generations about etiquette, and pothole repair, and the existential and eldritch horror that lurks in the abandoned subway tunnels, its rope-like tentacles creeping into citizens' homes each night while they lie dreaming?"

Erica opens her eyes and stares at the woman. The woman looks placidly back at her, and Erica wonders if werewolves can get concussions, because none of what's happening makes any sense to her. She looks around and nothing is familiar to her: a two-storey clapboard house and scrubby plants and sand that's pale in the moonlight; a chain-link fence and beyond that a brightly-lit car dealership. "Do you have a phone I can use? I need to call…" She can't think of who to call. She doesn't know if Boyd has managed to get away from the Alpha Pack; she's pretty sure that Derek would help her but there's a part of her that shrinks away from calling him, self-conscious and awkward. "I'm from Beacon Hills, is that far—"

"I know where you're from," the woman says, standing and brushing dirt from her skirts. "You're from the other side of the mountain—or you would be, if mountains existed. But that's what a beacon's for, isn't it? The high places?"

Erica bites her lip and decides to give actual communication one last try. "My name is Erica Reyes—"

"Erika," the woman says with a shake of her head.

"Yes," Erica says slowly. "Erica."

"No," the woman says, "Erika."

"Erica Reyes," Erica tries again, "and I—"

"You're saying it wrong," the woman says, cutting her off. "Erika with a K, not a C."

The weirdest thing isn't that the woman is saying this with a look of utter conviction on her face—it's that now that Erica is paying attention, she can hear the difference.

"You want some tea?" the woman asks, gesturing back towards the house. "Never met an Erika yet who didn't love tea, but you'll have to excuse me because all I've got right now is chamomile—Erika goes through the peppermint like you wouldn't believe."

"I don't—" Erica goes to stand, and for the first time she realises why the moon isn't calling to her. She looks down at her body and nothing is familiar to her, nothing at all—a transformation that surpasses even what Derek's bite had given her. Erica stands up, and up, and she's towering over the woman now on long limbs, no need for her heels anymore. "What—what am I? What did you do?"

"Oh honey," the woman says, clucking her tongue. "I never do anything. I just give you all a place to stay when you get here, even if you're terrible about paying your share of the utilities and Erika never puts the toilet seat down. Maybe I phone in some tips to Cecil, that's all. What else is an old woman supposed to do with her time?"

Erica holds up her hands. They're trembling, her fingers unnaturally long and faintly see-through, and somehow Erica knows that they're capable of the kind of strength that even a beta werewolf couldn't match. She can hear something in the distance—music; trumpets and cellos and a humming chorus—and now when she looks over at the clapboard house she can see dozens of faces at the windows, watching her. Each face is outlined with an aura of deep and pulsing black, and is at once calm and strange and a home-coming. "I didn't ask for any of this," she says, meaning this moment and all the blood and pain and fear that had come before it; meaning the Alpha Pack and being torn away from Boyd and all the things she hadn't realised she was saying yes to when she'd agreed to the bite. "I just wanted to be better."

"I know, dear," the woman says. She reaches out and takes one of Erica's hands in both of hers and pats it gently. The touch feels strangely muted, like her flesh isn't really touching Erica's. Erica shivers. "None of us ever asks for it, but sometimes the angels call on particular people to serve—to serve a great war, to serve the greatest calling. And you were weeping when you died, you know, and is there a clearer 'yes' than that?"

Erica's back aches, sharp and quick and splitting open like an over-ripe fruit, and she knows without having to look, without having to be told, that her wings have grown in, that they are golden and lush and lustrous beneath the desert moon. The soles of her feet no longer quite make contact with the sand. She is not better; she is who she is, and when she closes her eyes she can still see this whole new town stretching out around her. In Beacon Hills, she had been slowly learning to orient herself by the feel of her pack around her; now her body is part of the host and she knows where true north lies with senses that are entirely ineffable. "I have been called," she says, and feels the truth of it resonate in the place where her bone marrow used to be.

"Exactly," the woman says, tugging gently on Erica's hand. "Now come on, time for tea and carefully worded revelations, and if we leave it much longer, Erika will have eaten the last of the snickerdoodles before I can get anywhere near the cookie jar. And I don't know about you, but I always want to have a snickerdoodle handy when I have to talk about the man who is not tall and the man who is not short. Cinnamon sugar is very good at combatting a sense of creeping malaise, I find."

And Erica—Erika—cheeks wet and smiling, follows her.