Emory took the back wall of the Sheriff’s station, one shoulder against the bulletin board, and breathed through the burned coffee and the raw, unpracticed fear coming off every adult in the room people who’d never had real reason to be afraid before.
The lobby was packed.
Mrs.
Garrison from the hardware store.
The Millers, who always waved.
Coach, in sweatpants, arms crossed, scowling at the deputy behind the desk like this was a game the refs were calling wrong.
Half a body in the Preserve.
That was the line making the rounds, whispered and re-whispered until it didn’t sound like words anymore, just the shape of a nightmare people kept handing back and forth to see if it got lighter.
It didn’t.
Emory had heard it from his mother at six in the morning, her voice tight deciding whether to come home.
He’d told her to stay where the work was.
Locked the door after and stood in the kitchen counting exits, because the part of him that was twenty-four and had watched this show knew exactly what remains in the Preserve meant.
An Alpha, working a list.
People tied to a fire six years gone.
Peter.
The name sat in his chest like a stone he couldn’t spit out and couldn’t swallow.
He knew.
Broad strokes, the shape clear and the details fogged at the edges.
The Hale fire.
The revenge.
The kills that would stack up one by one until someone stopped him.
Emory knew who.
He did not know when, or which face died which night, or how to say a single word of it without ending up on a list himself.
So he stood against the wall and kept his mouth shut and hated every second of it.
The Sheriff came out from the back, and the crowd went quiet wanting an answer, knowing they wouldn’t get one they liked.
He looked tired.
Older than his face.
He’d taken this job for speeding tickets and the occasional drunk kid, and now he was standing in front of neighbors who wanted a promise he couldn’t make.
“Folks,” he said.
Plain.
No preamble.
“I know you’ve heard things.
Some of it’s true.
We found remains in the Preserve last night, and we’re treating it as a homicide.
I can’t give you more than that right now because we don’t have more than that.”
Someone in the front Emory couldn’t see who asked about an animal attack.
The Sheriff’s face didn’t move.
“We’re looking at all possibilities.”
A lie.
Not a malicious one.
The truth had claws, and he had a town full of people who’d never had to believe in those.
Emory’s back teeth ached.
The Hum, waking up.
He felt it like a truck idling two streets over, sub-bass, under the heart.
The crowd was scared the real thing and somewhere past the edge of reality a few dozen someones who’d paid to watch a nobody in a nowhere town were leaning in.
The warmth spread up from his sternum into his jaw.
Not much.
A trickle, maybe, if he was lucky.
If lucky was the word for warming himself on a dead man in the woods and a room full of people who just wanted their kids to walk to school alive.
Emory swallowed.
Shoved it down.
The Hum didn’t care.
He hated that he could count them.
Three, maybe four, a flutter of attention like moths at a window.
Hated that he knew what it meant when the Heat started climbing.
Hated that his teeth ached before the bad thing, not after.
The crowd was asking questions now, all at once, and the Sheriff was doing the thing good cops do saying a lot of words that don’t mean anything until people feel better anyway.
Emory wasn’t listening.
He was watching the door, because it had opened and the Stilinski kid had walked in with a backpack and a look like he’d been awake for thirty-six hours and had opinions about all of them.
He saw his dad.
Stopped.
Looked at the crowd, at the deputy, at the tackboard behind Emory’s shoulder, and then for a second, a flicker at Emory.
Sorting him.
Emory looked away first.
Mistake.
The guilty tell.
He knew it the second he did it and couldn’t take it back.
The kid moved through the crowd like he had permissions no one had given him which, as far as Emory could tell, was how he moved through the world.
Got to the front.
Said something low to his dad.
The Sheriff’s face shut like a door, hand landing on his son’s shoulder, steering him toward the hall.
People took that as a dismissal.
Started filing out, talking, still scared, the fear curdling into anger because anger was easier.
Emory stayed where he was.
Waited.
Counted backwards from twenty and told himself he was leaving, he was walking out, he wasn’t going to do the stupid thing.
He did the stupid thing.
He followed Stiles.
Not far.
Just to the hallway outside the Sheriff’s office, where the door was half-closed and Stiles’s voice was coming through it fast and sure he’d already solved the problem and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.
“not a mountain lion, Dad, mountain lions don’t leave half a body on purpose, that’s not even how they eat, and if you look at the pattern”
“There’s no pattern.
It’s one victim.”
“Two.”
Silence.
Emory stopped breathing.
“There was a second call this morning,” Stiles said.
Quieter.
“You didn’t announce it because you didn’t want the panic, but I heard Ramirez on the radio Laurel Drive, four blocks from the Preserve access and if you draw a line from the first site to”
“Stiles.” The Sheriff’s voice, flat and tired and full of the kind of love that sounded like anger because anger was safer.
“Go home.”
“I’m just saying”
“I know what you’re saying.
Go home.”
A chair scraped.
Emory had exactly enough time to take two steps back and look like he’d been walking the other direction before the kid came out of the office, backpack over one shoulder, chin up like a boy proven right and sent away for it anyway.
He saw Emory.
Stopped.
“You’re still here,” Stiles said.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Emory didn’t have a good answer for that.
Gave a bad one instead.
“Wanted to make sure they were saying it was a mountain lion.
So I’d know what to tell my mom.”
Stiles looked at him.
Really looked locker room, tryouts, same drill building a file one glance at a time.
“They’re saying it’s a mountain lion,” Stiles said slowly.
“But it’s not a mountain lion.”
Emory said nothing.
“You didn’t look surprised,” Stiles said.
“Just now.
When I said two victims.
You didn’t look surprised.”
He hadn’t.
He’d known there’d be two, and then more, all tied to a fire six years gone that he wasn’t supposed to know about. Get faster updates on g.com.
Should’ve lied.
Faked the surprise, the horror, the normal human thing.
He didn’t.
“I’m not,” Emory said.
Honest.
Stupid.
“I’m not surprised.”
Something in Stiles went quiet and quick, the way it did right before he pulled a thread loose.
“Why?”
“Because people don’t get killed by mountain lions in Beacon Hills.
And if it wasn’t one the first time, it won’t be one the second time.
That’s” He stopped himself.
Nearly said that’s how the pattern works.
Caught it.
Finished safer.
“That’s just logic.”
He stared at Emory for three full seconds.
Then he said, very quietly, “You’re really weird, you know that?”
“Yeah,” Emory said.
“I’ve heard.”
The kid hitched his backpack higher and walked past him, and Emory stood there in the empty hallway with the Hum still warm on the back of his neck and the sick certainty that he’d failed a test he hadn’t known he was taking.
He left through the side door.
The parking lot was emptying out under a sky going purple at the edges, dusk coming too early this time of year, every shadow growing teeth.
Emory got in the truck.
Sat there with the keys in his hand and the engine off.
He knew the list.
Not the whole thing the edges dissolved whenever he tried to hold them but enough.
The fire.
The Hale house.
Everyone inside.
Everyone except Peter, who’d spent six years in a hospital bed learning patience.
Now he was killing.
The people dying were the ones who’d set the fire or watched it burn or fed on the ashes, and Emory could see the shape of it justice-shaped violence, almost fair if you kept your eyes off the bodies.
He had a name in his head.
One of the next ones.
He was almost sure.
No evidence.
No proof.
No way to say the Alpha who bit me is killing people tied to a fire you think was an accident, and I know because I watched it on a screen in a reality without werewolves.
A ticket to a cell or a hunter’s list.
Either way, dead or locked up when the next name on Peter’s list stopped breathing.
Emory started the truck.
Drove home.
The house was empty.
His mother was working.
He made a sandwich, didn’t eat it, and stood at the kitchen counter staring at nothing while the Hum idled under his ribs like a purr.
The Watchers had paid.
Not much.
A trickle, maybe, off a town’s fear and a boy standing in a hallway knowing things he shouldn’t.
It felt like blood money.
It felt like a door swinging open that he didn’t know how to close.
Emory threw the sandwich away.
Went to bed.
Lay there staring at the ceiling, teeth locked, a name he still couldn’t say pressing up under his ribs like a promise already broken.
Everyone walks out, he’d told himself once.
He was starting to think that was a lie.