Emory’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking long enough to lift the spoon.
Third try.
He set it back against the bowl and let the soup go still and cold in morning light that felt too bright, in a house that smelled like his mother’s leftover cooking and old wood his hands clean now, no blood, just the pink seams where his claws had torn his own palms.
Wolf healing was supposed to be fast.
He’d felt it work before, the torn side from the Bite knitting itself shut in hours, the scrapes from the ravine closing over like they’d never happened.
That was the trade, wasn’t it.
You got bit, you got the claws and the speed and the moon trying to wear your skin, but at least the damage didn’t stick.
Except this morning his ribs still ached where they’d cracked against the basement wall.
The nail beds where he’d clawed concrete were raw and tender under the regrown nails.
And deeper than any of that, under the skin and the bone, there was a wrongness his body couldn’t metabolize a slowness, a drag, like the wolf was sulking somewhere in his marrow and refusing to help.
Suppression debt, he thought.
The word arrived fully formed, clinical, the way his transmigrator brain sometimes just handed him things.
You bottled the shift instead of integrating it.
This is what happens when you fight your own body for eight hours straight.
His phone buzzed on the table.
Emory looked at it.
Stiles, again.
Third text in an hour.
so where were you last night lacrosse thing ran late, you were gonna show scott says he was home sick.
you get the plague too or what
Emory picked up the phone with hands that felt like they belonged to someone older.
Typed back with his thumbs because holding the phone steady was easier than holding a spoon.
home.
wasn’t feeling great.
still not, honestly.
True enough.
The kind of truth you could hide a whole second life under.
He set the phone down.
Looked at the soup.
Gave up on it.
The walk to the living room took longer than it should have.
His legs worked fine no limp, nothing visible but every step came a half-second late, like the signal from his brain to his muscles had to travel through mud first.
He made it to the couch.
Sat down harder than he meant to.
Let his head tip back against the cushions and closed his eyes.
The Hum in his chest was quiet.
It had been roaring all night, delighted and hungry, thrilled in some ugly private way every time the wolf clawed closer to the surface, and now it was back to that barely-there idling thrum he’d started to think of as baseline.
The crowd had gotten their show.
They’d watched him nearly lose, watched the cage hold by a thread, and now they were waiting to see what happened next.
He hated that he could feel them hated worse that some part of him, the showrunner part that read beats and hooks and knew when an audience was leaning in, could sense their mood like weather.
They’d wanted chaos.
He’d given them control, barely, and they were still here.
His phone buzzed again.
Emory opened his eyes.
Checked it.
Stiles: you sound like death.
want me to bring you stuff.
i make a great plague nurse.
ask literally no one.
Emory almost smiled.
Typed back: i’m good. Find the original chapter at g.com.
sleep it off.
thanks tho.
He meant it.
The last thing he needed was Stiles Stilinski in his house, cataloguing the basement door and the way Emory’s hands shook and the four parallel gouges in the concrete floor downstairs that he hadn’t figured out how to explain yet.
Another text, different thread.
Scott this time.
hey man you ok?
stiles said you were sick too
Too.
That was the word that stuck.
Emory sat up straighter, ribs complaining, and read it again.
Scott had been home sick last night.
The same night Emory had been white-knuckling a suppression skill in a basement cage.
The same night the moon had climbed across the sky and dragged at every wolf in Beacon Hills like a hook in the chest.
The same night Scott McCall, bitten Beta, canonical good heart, had survived his first full moon.
Emory’s thumbs moved.
yeah.
rough night.
you good?
The reply came fast.
yeah.
i think so.
feels like i got hit by a truck but i’m ok allison texted me this morning and i felt better
There it was.
Emory stared at the screen.
Allison texted me this morning and I felt better.
Not I chained myself to a radiator that was canon, that was the shape Emory half-remembered from a show he’d watched in a life that didn’t have real werewolves in it but the part that mattered was right there in the subtext.
Scott had survived because he had a person.
An Anchor.
A girl whose name on a screen made the wolf settle because she was the thing worth staying human for.
Emory had survived on a diner and the memory of curly fries and Stiles Stilinski’s gallows-humor grin, and it had guttered out halfway through the night and left him running on nothing but the ash line and his own bloody-minded refusal to break.
An Anchor that’s a person, he thought.
Not a place.
Not a memory.
A person.
He didn’t have one of those.
He texted back: glad you’re ok.
get some rest.
Scott sent back a thumbs-up and a string of emojis that were trying very hard to convey I am a normal human teenager who had a normal human flu.
Emory set the phone down.
Pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and breathed slow and deliberate through the ache in his chest that had nothing to do with cracked ribs.
The problem was obvious now, laid out plain: the moon pulled, you needed an Anchor to pull back, and his was improvised, fragile built out of borrowed ordinary and a rapport he’d barely started and it had failed.
Next month the moon would pull again, harder, because the wolf would remember how close it had come this time.
Next month he’d need something better.
He had twenty-eight days to figure out what that was.
His phone buzzed a fourth time.
Emory looked.
A news alert, local.
ANIMAL ATTACK INVESTIGATION CONTINUES Sheriff’s Department confirms second victim found near Beacon Hills Preserve; investigators emphasize attacks occurred over multiple nights including Friday.
Emory read it twice.
Friday night.
Full moon night.
The night every werewolf in a hundred-mile radius should have been locked down, riding out the shift, too busy clawing at their own cages to hunt anything.
The Alpha had killed someone anyway.
Emory set the phone down very carefully on the couch cushion beside him.
His hands had stopped shaking.
The wrongness under his skin was still there, the suppression debt dragging at him like a bruise that wouldn’t fade, but his head was clear and cold and doing the math it had always been good at.
The Alpha wasn’t a mindless moon-monster.
The Alpha had a plan.
And Emory, broke and hurt and running on an Anchor made of diner grease and borrowed smiles, was trying to outlast a predator smart enough to hunt with purpose on the one night nothing should have been hunting at all.
He sat on the couch in his too-quiet house and let that settle.
Outside the window the sun was warm and ordinary.
A car went by.
Somebody’s dog barked three yards over.
Beacon Hills on a Saturday morning, perfectly normal, full of people who had no idea what walked their streets at night.
Emory’s phone lit up one more time.
Stiles again.
also scott’s being weird.
weirder than sick-weird.
you notice anything?
Yeah, Emory thought.
He typed: he’s fine.
we’re all fine.
go bother your dad.
Stiles sent back a middle-finger emoji and went quiet.
Emory closed his eyes.
The Hum purred, faint and pleased, under his sternum.
Somewhere far away, in a reality that had never heard of Beacon Hills, somebody was still watching.
He pulled a blanket off the back of the couch.
Lay down slow, favoring the ribs.
Let his body do whatever partial, inadequate healing it was going to do while his brain turned over the new shape of the problem.
An Anchor that was a person.
A predator that hunted smart.
Twenty-eight days until the next moon and a regeneration that wasn’t closing the gap fast enough.
The morning after his first full moon, and Emory Voss had survived.
It didn’t feel like winning.
It felt like he’d bought himself four weeks to figure out how not to lose worse next time, and the price had been paid in parts of himself he didn’t know how to get back.
He pulled the blanket up.
Closed his eyes.
Let the exhaustion drag him under.
The last thing he heard before sleep took him was the dog barking again, and the faraway sound of a text he didn’t have the energy to check.
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