Emory stood in the hallway with his backpack slung wrong on one shoulder, hands jammed deep in his jacket pockets where they couldn’t reach for anything, and read the memorial on the community board three times because reading it was easier than walking past it.
A printed photo of Aaron Repovich in his firefighter’s dress blues, forty years younger and still whole, above a paragraph about service and loss that said nothing true about the way he’d died running from something with claws.
A woman he didn’t recognize Repovich’s daughter, maybe, the right age for it was crying quietly near the trophy case.
Her friend had an arm around her shoulders.
Neither of them looked at him.
Why would they.
He was just another kid in the hallway trying to look respectful and sad in the acceptable amount, a performance everyone here knew how to do.
He’d killed her father with a phone call and good intentions and she would never, ever know.
Emory made himself walk.
The Hum sat low and dormant under his sternum, barely a flutter.
The Heat had cooled days ago.
Apparently a boy standing uselessly still in a high school hallway wasn’t much of a show.
He was fine with that.
He was fine with all of it going quiet and staying that way until he figured out the rules well enough to stop breaking things.
Stiles found him at lunch.
Not found Stiles had been there first, at the far end of the usual table, and Emory had made the mistake of sitting down three seats over before he’d clocked the laptop open and the expression on Stiles’s face that said he was chewing on something and wouldn’t spit it out until he’d worried it down to bone.
“So,” Stiles said, without preamble, without looking up from the screen.
“Anonymous tip.
Guy runs.
Guy dies.
Very clean, very tragic, exactly nobody knows who made the call.”
Emory’s heartbeat didn’t spike.
He made sure of it.
He unwrapped his sandwich peanut butter, the only thing in the house that didn’t require a plan and said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Stiles’s fingers drummed the table, a quick rattling tap-tap-tap that didn’t match the typing he wasn’t doing.
“My dad’s got the recording.
Disposable cell, no trace, very professional.
Someone who knew exactly what they were doing and exactly how much to say.”
Emory took a bite.
Chewed.
Swallowed past the taste of copper he couldn’t actually taste and said, around peanut butter that sat like glue on his tongue, “Makes sense.
If you know something and you don’t want your name on it.”
“Right.
Smart.” Stiles looked up.
His eyes were sharp and fast and very, very awake.
“Except the tip didn’t name the guy.
Just said there’s a body, here’s where.
So whoever called it in already knew Repovich was dead before my dad’s people got there.
Which means they were either there when it happened, or they got there right after, or”
He stopped.
Let the sentence hang.
Emory made himself hold the look.
Made himself not blink, not glance away, not do the things a guilty person did when someone smart was watching.
The over-control was its own tell and he knew it and he did it anyway because the alternative was flinching and flinching was worse.
“Or?” Emory said.
Something behind Stiles’s focus went very still, just for a fraction of a second.
Then he shrugged and looked back at the laptop.
“Or they knew he’d be there.
Knew he’d run.
Very specific knowledge for a very convenient stranger.”
A faint warming, teeth-first, the promise of an ache that hadn’t landed yet.
Emory made himself take another bite.
Stiles kept talking, half to himself now, the laptop a prop he didn’t need.
“The thing is, Repovich survived a fire six years ago.
Hale fire.
He walked out, he kept his mouth shut, he was fine.
And then one week one very busy week, lot of weird stuff happening, lot of people noticing things they shouldn’t someone spooks him bad enough that he runs straight into the woods at night.
And something with claws is waiting.”
He looked up again.
“You ever feel like the timing on things in this town is just a little too good?”
Emory’s face was stone.
His heartbeat was stone.
He was composed and calm and controlled and it was costing him everything to sit there and not move, and Stiles could see it, Stiles could see all of it, because Stiles was the smartest person in this room and the least believed, and he’d stopped missing things a long time before anyone gave him credit for it.
“I’m new here,” Emory said, flat and true.
“I don’t know what the timing usually looks like.”
Stiles held his eyes a beat longer.
Two.
Then he smiled, quick and sharp and not even a little warm, and said, “Right.
Yeah.
New kid.
My bad.”
He closed the laptop.
Emory made himself finish the sandwich.
Made himself stay until Stiles left first, because leaving first was running and running was a confession he couldn’t afford.
The Hum cooled back to nothing.
The Heat went flat.
Somewhere far away, in a reality with no Beacon Hills and no dead firefighters and no boy at a lunch table choking on peanut butter and guilt, the crowd lost interest.
Scott caught him in the parking lot after last bell.
Emory had his keys out, the truck twenty feet away, freedom a straight shot if he could just get the door open and the engine started before anyone asked him anything else he couldn’t answer.
“Hey.”
Scott’s voice, warm and worried and human.
Emory stopped.
Scott jogged up, backpack bouncing, looking exactly like what he was a kid who’d been going through something alone and was tired of it.
His eyes were shadowed.
His hands were shaking just enough to notice if you knew what to look for.
Emory knew what to look for.
“You okay?” Scott asked.
The question was so backwards, so absolutely upside-down, that Emory almost laughed.
He didn’t laugh.
Laughing right now would crack something.
“Yeah,” Emory said.
“Long week.”
“Right.
Yeah.
Me too.” Scott shoved his hands in his pockets.
Looked at the ground.
Looked up. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
“Can I ask you something weird?”
No, Emory thought.
Please don’t.
“Sure,” he said.
Scott’s mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“Do you ever feel like like something’s growing teeth inside you?
Like you’re fine, and then you’re not fine, and you didn’t get a vote on the not-fine part, it just happens?”
The question landed in Emory’s chest like a fist.
He could fix this.
Right now.
One sentence.
You’re not crazy, you’re a werewolf, the moon’s in four days and here’s how you hold it.
He had Bite-Discipline in his bones, not bought yet but felt, the shape of the Hold already there.
He could teach Scott the thing that would save him a month of terror and a year of stumbling blind.
The Hum warmed.
Emory’s teeth ached.
The Heat climbed, just a degree, just enough to notice because here it was, the decision, the fork, the moment where he could be useful or stay safe, and somewhere far away the Watchers leaned in to see which one he’d pick.
Scott was looking at him.
Hopeful.
Scared.
Waiting.
Emory made himself smile.
Made it crooked and tired and just confused enough.
“I mostly just feel like I’m bad at chemistry and running on no sleep,” he said.
“You should probably talk to a doctor if something’s actually wrong.”
The hope in Scott’s face dimmed.
“Right,” Scott said.
“Yeah.
Probably nothing.”
He clapped Emory on the shoulder gentle, human, no idea his hand was resting on another wolf and walked off toward his bike.
Emory stood there with his keys biting into his palm and the Heat cooling in his chest and the knowledge that he’d just done harm by doing nothing, which was a brand-new way to fail and somehow worse than the first.
The moon hung over Beacon Hills, a bright coin in the late-afternoon sky, getting rounder.
Four days.
He got in the truck.
Started the engine.
Drove home with his hands locked on the wheel at ten and two, because if he let go he didn’t know what he’d reach for, and reaching had a body count now.
The Hum went quiet.
The crowd, apparently, had seen enough.
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