Stiles jabbed the pushpin into the corkboard hard enough to crack the cork backing, then sat back on his heels and looked at what he’d done.
Emory Voss’s stolen school photo, skewered dead center of a red-string timeline his dad would ground him for a year over if he ever saw it.
One-eighteen in the morning.
Printouts fanned across the carpet like a losing hand of cards.
His dad had told him, repeatedly, with increasing volume, to stay out of the homicide case.
Stiles had nodded.
He’d meant it at the time.
The problem was Scott.
Scott was getting worse.
The wolf, the claws, the teeth growing inside him all of it was getting louder by the day, and the full moon was in four nights, and Stiles had exactly zero training in how to stop your best friend from turning into a monster in the middle of his own bedroom.
So.
Research.
Research was what Stiles had.
Research was his entire personality at this point.
And research had handed him Emory Voss on a silver platter he didn’t want and couldn’t ignore.
He pulled the next sheet from the stack his dad had left on the kitchen table.
Incident report, dated two weeks back.
Body in the Preserve, male, late forties, cause of death: massive trauma consistent with an animal attack.
Stiles cross-referenced the date against the school transfer logs he’d sweet-talked out of the front office by pretending he was helping with the yearbook.
Emory Voss.
First day: two weeks and three days ago.
Stiles drew the line on the timeline in blue pen, then sat back and looked at it.
The pattern held.
Every killing, every body, every night the woods had gone from normal California woods with deer to something out there is eating people all of it landed after Emory’s arrival.
Not the same day.
Not convenient enough to be obvious.
But after.
“Okay,” Stiles said aloud, to his empty room and the poster of a Lamborghini that had been watching him have a slow-motion breakdown for the last three hours.
“So either the new kid is a harbinger of doom, or I’ve completely lost it.”
He hadn’t lost it.
He knew he hadn’t, because worse than the timeline was the face.
Stiles flipped to a blank page in his notebook, stared at it, then started writing from memory.
Lunch, Wednesday.
Scott said the thing about his mom working doubles.
Emory nodded.
Not the “uh-huh I’m listening” nod.
The nod that came a half-second early, like he’d known the sentence before Scott finished it.
Hallway, Thursday morning.
Lydia and Jackson fighting about something, loud, everyone staring.
I made a joke”lovers’ quarrel, take bets now” and Emory smiled at exactly the right time.
Not after I said it.
Not a beat late, not the half-second pause normal people need to decide if a joke’s funny.
Right on the line, like he’d timed it.
Friday, the fire alarm.
Everyone else startled.
I startled.
Emory just looked at the ceiling, picked up his bag, walked out.
Like he’d been waiting for it.
Stiles underlined the last line twice, then wrote in the margin: Nobody’s timing is that good unless they’ve heard the joke before.
He flipped back to the timeline.
Emory’s school photo borrowed from the front office, technically stolen, don’t tell his dad stared back at him from the corkboard.
Dark hair.
Pale scar through the eyebrow.
Quiet.
Unremarkable.
The kind of kid who blended into the back row and disappeared from your memory five minutes after class ended.
Except he didn’t disappear.
Not for Stiles, who’d spent his whole life being the one person in every room who caught the thing everybody else let slide the pause held a half-second too long, the detail that didn’t fit the story people were telling.
Emory Voss was wrong in a way that didn’t have a name yet.
He picked up the red pen.
Hypothesis one: Emory was connected to the killer.
Maybe he knew them.
Maybe he was feeding them information who went into the woods, when, where.
A lookout.
An accomplice.
Stiles drew the line, hated it immediately, crossed it out.
Emory didn’t act like someone scared of being caught.
He acted like someone trying very hard to be boring, which was different, and the difference mattered.
Hypothesis two: Emory wasn’t connected to the killer.
Emory was the killer.
Stiles wrote it, stared at it, didn’t cross it out.
It fit.
It fit too well.
New kid arrives, killings start, new kid is never surprised by anything because he already knows what’s coming because he’s the one making it come.
Stiles could build a case.
He had the timeline.
He had the pattern.
He had the gut-certainty that anyone who smiled at exactly the right time, every single time, was either psychic or performing, and Stiles had some bad news about psychics.
The problem was proof.
He had none.
Zero.
An arrival date and a vibes-based suspicion would get him laughed out of his dad’s office, and he knew it, and the knowing was the worst part because Stiles was right.
He could feel it the way he’d felt his mom’s bad days coming before anyone said a word out loud a certainty that arrived ahead of any proof and never once turned out wrong.
He’d hated being right about that too.
Emory Voss was dangerous.
Stiles pulled a pushpin from the cup on his desk, picked up the stolen school photo, and pinned it to the board next to the map of the killings.
Stepped back.
Looked at the whole board the timeline, the bodies, the quiet transfer kid in the center of the web, smiling at the camera like he’d never done a harmful thing in his life.
“Got you,” Stiles said quietly.
Then, because he was his father’s son and he knew better: “I can’t prove it yet.
But I will.”
Scott, texting at one-thirty in the morning: cant sleep.
feels like smthng crawling under my skin.
is that normal?
Stiles looked at the board.
At Emory’s face.
At the timeline that said his best friend’s problem had started the same week the new kid had rolled into town.
He typed: working on it.
i think i know whats going on.
He didn’t hit send.
Because if he was right if Emory was behind the killings, or tied to whoever was, or knew what was hunting in the Preserve then telling Scott would mean Scott going after him.
Scott, who could barely control the claws.
Scott, who would try to help and get himself killed, or worse.
Stiles deleted the message.
Typed instead: yeah probly just stress.
big game monday right?
Hit send.
Put the phone face-down on the carpet.
He’d tell Scott when he had proof.
Real proof.
The kind that would hold up.
The kind that would keep Scott from doing something brave and stupid and fatal.
Until then, this was his.
The quiet hunt.
The solo track.
Stiles Stilinski, seventeen, professionally unbelieved, the only person in Beacon Hills who’d noticed the new kid didn’t flinch at the wrong things.
He pulled the notebook back into his lap, flipped to a fresh page, wrote EMORY VOSS at the top and underlined it three times.
Then he started listing every single off thing he’d clocked in two and a half weeks.
The nods.
The timing.
Emory’s face going stone-flat for a half-second when Stiles had floated the tip theory, before the smile came back like nothing had happened.
How he walked like someone who knew exactly where all the exits were.
It was a long list.
By two a.m., Stiles had filled four pages and his hand was cramping and his eyes were burning and he was more certain than he’d been about anything since his mom’s diagnosis.
Emory Voss was a problem.
The new kid was the missing piece.
And Stiles was going to prove it, or he was going to figure out he’d gone completely insane, and either way he’d know.
He lay back on the carpet, stared at the ceiling, and thought: I’m right.
I know I’m right.
He’s exactly what I’m looking for.
I just don’t know what he is yet.
Outside, the moon was a fat coin in the sky, getting rounder.
Four days.
Stiles closed his eyes.
He didn’t sleep.