The Charger pulled into the parking lot at 7:38, and I slid it into the usual spot. The engine died, leaving only the muffled sounds of people arriving, doors slamming, and someone yelling something about a chemistry test.
I sat there for a few seconds. Not to be dramatic, just because my body was still getting used to waking up early after spending all of Sunday out cold in bed. The early morning hours in the woods with the mercenary had exacted a physical toll that mana couldn't pay. A sore shoulder, a scraped knee, and that irritating feeling of not having slept enough despite sleeping way too much.
I grabbed my backpack, got out of the car, and locked it.
The morning air was cold. That specific Beacon Hills cold that feels wet, that clings to your skin. Jackson's silver Porsche was in its spot, but he was nowhere to be found. No lacrosse players surrounding him, no Lydia on his arm. The parking space felt orphaned.
I walked toward the glass double doors. The lot was already filling up, people dragging their feet with that Monday energy I knew all too well.
Inside the school, the usual smell. Stale coffee, disinfectant, and dampness in the corners. I went to my locker, spun the combination, tossed two unnecessary textbooks inside, and grabbed my Economics notebook. I slammed the metal door shut.
Stiles was on the other side of the hallway.
Leaning against the water fountain, a disposable coffee cup in hand, backpack slipping off one shoulder. Staring at me. He didn't come over, didn't wave, didn't open his mouth to fire off ten questions in four seconds like he usually did. He just stood there, dead serious, took a sip of his coffee, and walked away down the hall.
Right. He was still pissed about what happened in the cafeteria when Lydia disappeared. It made sense. I had cut him off in front of everyone to deal with Rowan, and Stiles was the type to swallow almost anything except being treated like he was disposable.
I mentally filed it away and kept walking. I had things to do.
The sophomore hallway was mostly empty before the first bell. Most of the students were still crowded in the cafeteria or the entrance, milking their last minutes of freedom.
And it was there, at the corner leading to the French classroom, that I ran into Lydia.
She was walking alone. That in itself was weird. On any normal day, she'd have Allison by her side or some social satellite orbiting her. But today she was clutching her books against her chest with both arms, her strawberry-blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail that lacked its usual surgical precision. Her makeup was flawless, because Lydia Martin rebuilt herself with lipstick before rebuilding anything else. But underneath the foundation, the dark circles were there. And beneath the queen-bee posture, a stiffness I recognized as a sleepless night.
She saw me before I could call out to her.
Her steps slowed. Her chin went up on autopilot, and her expression closed off into that mask she used as armor. But her eyes recognized me with something she would never admit out loud. Relief.
"Nathan." Her voice was tightly controlled. She stopped two meters away. "I was looking for you."
"Me too."
The hallway was empty. Just the hum of the fluorescent lights between us.
"I need to ask you something." She gripped her books tighter, her knuckles turning white. "And I need you not to lie. Because I spent the entire night trying to find a rational explanation for what happened in those woods, and I couldn't."
"Ask."
"What is happening to me?"
It wasn't rhetorical. It wasn't dramatic. It was the question of a girl who woke up hearing the voices of dead people, who sleepwalked naked through a forest without knowing how she got there, and who saw a man get thrown against a tree by a force that shouldn't exist. Her 170 IQ was spinning its wheels in the void, and Lydia Martin didn't know how to handle answers she couldn't find herself.
I looked both ways down the hall. Empty for now, but the bell was going to ring in a few minutes.
"Come with me." I tilted my head toward the library. "Not here."
The library was deserted, just as I expected. I headed to the back, between the World History and Biographies shelves. The same corner where I'd sat with Erica on my first day.
Lydia sat in the opposite chair, stacked her books on the table, and glared at me.
"Explain."
"Before any explanation, I need you to trust me for sixty seconds. No questions. After that, I'll answer whatever I can."
"Sixty seconds is a long time to trust someone who does impossible things in the middle of the woods, Nathan."
"Fifty-eight now."
She took a deep breath. Exhaled through her nose.
"Go."
I activated Magic Sight at Level 5. The library lost its normal colors and turned into an ocean of lines and frequencies. And Lydia was a beacon. Her signature screamed at a frequency that resembled the sound of a crystal glass right before it shatters. It wasn't visible mana like a mage's. It was auditory in my perception, an echo that phased through walls and spread for miles. The Halloways would hear this from across the state.
I began to weave.
It wasn't a shield, it wasn't a barrier. It was a geometric illusion. I folded the vectors of her magical signature back onto themselves, creating a closed loop where the frequency went in but didn't come out. The sound would keep circulating inside, but to any external sensor, Lydia would just be another teenager with residual mana. Background noise.
My fingers moved through the air as if touching a surface only I could see. Mana threads as fine as hair intertwined around her aura. Lydia sat perfectly still. Her eyes were locked on my hand, and even without the Sight, she felt something. I saw the skin on her arm erupt in goosebumps. Her breathing grew shallow.
"What are you—" she started.
"Thirteen seconds," I cut her off, my concentration unwavering.
The threads snapped shut. The loop locked.
In my Sight, the deafening frequency vanished. Muffled, compressed, hidden. To any mage or sensitive creature, Lydia was now invisible.
I deactivated the Sight.
"Done."
Lydia stared at me for a few seconds.
"I felt it," she said slowly. "The whispers. The ones I've been hearing since the hospital. They didn't go away, but they feel further away now. Like someone closed a window."
"This will buy you time."
"Time for what?"
"To figure out what's happening to you without dangerous people tracking you down."
Her intellectual defense mechanism booted up. I saw the usual Lydia Martin resurface.
"Okay. Now explain the rest. The voices. The woods. What you did in that clearing. What is happening to me."
"You're a Banshee, Lydia."
The silence lasted about four seconds.
"A Banshee," she repeated. Her tone flat, testing the word on her tongue.
"The simple version: you sense death. The voices, the whispers, walking into the woods without remembering. All of that is your body reacting to something that was always inside you, but has only just awakened."
She looked at me, processing. Her 170-IQ brain whirring, trying to slot this into some category that made logical sense. I could see it wasn't working, but she was trying.
"And you? What are you?"
"Mage. Ancient bloodline. What I did in the clearing was magic."
"Magic." She repeated it like she was tasting food she wasn't sure was poisoned.
"I know it's a lot to take in, and I'm not the right person to explain everything to you. There's a lot going on in this town that goes way beyond me."
"Like what?"
"Talk to Scott. And Allison. Ask them about what happens in Beacon Hills."
Lydia frowned.
"Scott and Allison? What do they have to do with this?"
"More than you think."
She studied me for another two seconds. I didn't break eye contact, but I didn't offer anything else either. Whatever she did with that information was her choice.
Lydia grabbed her books off the table, stood up, and fixed her hair with one hand. Her queen-bee posture returned, but underneath it, I could see the gears turning at a speed that would give most people a migraine.
"Thank you for the spell." Her voice was steady. "I'll be having a chat with them."
She walked out of the library without looking back.
I stayed there for a few seconds, listening to her footsteps fade away. The bell rang.
I left the library.
Out in the hallway, the usual chaos. Students bumping into each other, doors slamming, shouts about tests and practice. I cut through the middle, filtering it all out, heading toward my Economics class.
I sat at my desk in the back and opened my notebook. Class started. The teacher droned on about supply and demand, and I let mana move my pencil while I organized my next steps in my head. Lydia was protected and was about to shake up Scott's group with questions they weren't expecting. Now I needed to deal with Jackson and Erica, who I hadn't seen in days.
The bell for break rang, and I gathered my things.
I was stepping out into the hall when Jackson appeared in front of me.
He didn't have his usual swagger. No raised chin, no squared shoulders. He held his phone in one hand and looked like he hadn't slept at all. His skin was pale, his eyebags deep, and the edges of his irises had a yellowish tint that shouldn't be there.
"Salt." He pulled me into a corner of the hallway, by the lockers, away from the foot traffic. "I need to talk to you."
"Talk."
He unlocked his phone and shoved the screen in my face. It was a video. The camera pointed at his bed, the room dark, angled from above. An entire night of footage.
"I filmed myself sleeping," he said, his voice low. "The whole night. Because I wanted to see what happens to me. If I shift. If anything shows up."
"And?"
"And nothing." He hit play, scrubbing through the video. The footage showed Jackson sleeping, tossing, turning. Eight hours of a guy asleep. No claws, no scales, no glowing eyes. Nothing.
"I don't get it. I felt the bite take. I felt something change. But there's nothing here."
I looked at the phone. Then I looked at him.
"And what if there was?"
Jackson frowned. "What?"
"What if you had transformed, Jackson? What if the footage caught everything? You turning into some monster in the middle of the night, claws, scales, whatever. All of it recorded in an eight-hour video on your phone." I shoved the device back against his chest. "What if someone took that phone? What if the cops confiscated it for whatever reason? What if a teammate decided to snoop through it while you were in the locker room? Are you an idiot?"
His expression shifted. The vulnerability vanished, and the old Jackson flared up, his jaw clenching tightly.
"I needed to know what was happening to me, Salt. What did you expect me to do?"
"Anything other than creating video evidence of your own supernatural transformation and carrying it around in your pocket. Delete that shit."
"There's nothing to delete, that's the whole point!"
"Delete it anyway."
He glared at me furiously for about two seconds. Then he looked at the phone, pressed his lips into a thin line, and deleted the video.
The silence returned. The hallway was almost completely empty now, everyone settled in their classrooms. Jackson shoved the phone back into his pocket and just stood there, the anger slowly deflating, giving way to the one thing he hated more than anything else: needing someone.
He took a deep breath. His chest rose and fell slowly.
"I don't know what to do, Nathan." His voice came out quiet. "I wake up in pain. There's this dark liquid leaking out of me, and I don't know what it is. I feel things that don't make sense. And the tape shows nothing, which is almost worse than if it did, because at least then I'd have an answer."
He dragged a hand down his face.
"I'll quit the team if I have to. If that's the price, I'll pay it. I've been thinking about it since that day."
I stayed silent.
Without moving my hands, without altering my expression, I channeled a sliver of mana through my optic nerves. A quick, imperceptible read. Jackson's aura was a sickly, dark green mess, pulsing in irregular spasms. But his emotion, the intent behind his words, was clean. No calculation, no manipulation. He was being honest.
"You don't have to quit the team."
Jackson jerked his head up, confused.
"But you said—"
"I know what I said. It was to see how far you'd go. How willing you were to change to get better." I pushed off the lockers. "You passed."
He stood there, processing it. The confusion gave way to something between relief and anger at having been tested. But he didn't complain.
I leaned back against the locker and crossed my arms. Jackson already had that energy of someone expecting me to fix everything right then and there, to pull out a magic trick, give a diagnosis, offer a concrete answer.
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Shoot."
"Do you really care about Lydia? Genuinely?"
The question caught him completely off guard. He was expecting literally anything but that. His face cycled through three expressions in two seconds: confusion, defensiveness, and then something raw that he couldn't hide in time.
"What does that have to do with what's happening to me?"
"Answer the question."
Jackson clenched his jaw. Looked down at the hallway floor, up at the ceiling, at the fluorescent lights, anywhere but my eyes. When he finally looked back, the armor had dropped.
"Yes." His voice came out low. "I do."
"Then go talk to her. Make peace."
The ensuing silence was almost comical. Jackson stared at me like I'd just spoken Mandarin.
"Make peace," he repeated, slowly. "That's your advice? I'm telling you my body is rejecting a supernatural transformation, that there's black ooze leaking out of me, that I don't know what the hell I am, and your master plan is to tell me to apologize to my ex?"
"Yep."
"That doesn't solve anything, Nathan!" His voice spiked, his frustration boiling over. "I need answers! I need to know what's happening to my body, not couples therapy!"
I pushed off the locker. Took a step toward him, closing the distance, and the irritation on his face faltered when he saw my expression.
"Lydia is the only person in this entire school who actually gives a shit about you. Captain or no captain. Popular or not. Whatever you're turning into or not." My voice came out calm, void of anger or mockery. Just facts. "Everyone else hovering around you is there for the status, for the team, for the Porsche. She was the only one who stayed for Jackson. And you're losing that. Actually, you already have."
Jackson opened his mouth to retort, but I didn't let him.
"If you don't understand the importance of that, then you deserve to have your body reject the transformation."
The sentence dropped in the empty hallway like a ton of bricks.
Jackson took a half-step back. Not out of anger. From the impact. The yellowish tint in his eyes flickered for a fraction of a second, and I saw his jaw clench so hard the muscles popped.
He wanted to scream. Wanted to shove me, curse at me, tell me I didn't know anything. But the part of him that knew I was right the same part that had cried holding a bleeding Lydia on the grass held it all back.
"I don't know what to say to her." His voice was barely a whisper. "After everything I've done."
"Figure it out. That's step one."
I picked up my backpack from the floor and slung it over my shoulder.
"Once you do that, come find me. Then we'll talk about the rest."
I walked away down the hall. I didn't look back, but I heard him stand there for another ten seconds before his footsteps echoed in the opposite direction.
The bell rang again. Chemistry with Harris. I was going to be late, and I didn't care.
I walked without rushing. The hallway emptied out as students filed into their classrooms, and for about ten seconds, I was alone out there, left with the distant sound of doors clicking shut and the hum of the lights.
That was when I felt it.
Not with my ears. With my Sight. With that instinct Marcus had drilled into my head since day one.
A subtle shift in the building's mana flow. Like someone had opened a new faucet in a plumbing system I already knew by heart. The school had a residual signature that I'd mapped entirely over the past few weeks: the faint pulses of normal students, the gray echoes of the teachers, Scott's contained blue glow when he walked the halls. I knew every note of this song.
And there was a new note.
Hot. Dense. Wild in a way that wasn't a standard wolf, but still familiar.
I stopped dead in the middle of the hallway, turning my head slowly.
The flow was coming from the second floor. The east wing. From the direction of the Biology lab.
I activated my Sight at Level 3, just enough so I wouldn't burn too much energy. The building lit up in layers. And there, on the second floor, piercing through the ceiling like a pillar of light only I could see, was an aura I recognized instantly.
Erica.
But not the Erica I remembered.
Her broken, gray aura, full of short-circuits and epileptic sparks, was gone. In its place was something almost golden, vibrant, pulsing with a new energy that had no business being there. Raw, unchained, brimming with a vitality that felt like it was burning. And underneath it all, beneath that new light, I recognized the pattern.
Werewolf.
I deactivated my Sight and just stood there in the empty hall.
Derek had bitten Erica.
The first thing I felt wasn't anger. It was confusion. Because it didn't make sense. I had helped her. That day in the library, at the very beginning of all this, I'd redirected her mana, alleviated the pressure her epilepsy caused, and gave her the first time in months, maybe years, where the headache just stopped. She had walked out of there with color in her cheeks and a "thank you" that sounded like I'd handed back something she thought she'd lost forever.
I thought that had been enough. That if her body wasn't so desperate, so broken, she wouldn't have accepted the Bite when Derek showed up offering the full package of strength, health, and power in exchange for blind loyalty. The Erica I remembered from the show accepted because she had absolutely nothing left to lose. The Erica I had helped should have had at least enough to hesitate.
But I was wrong.
What I did in the library was a patch job. A band-aid on a hemorrhage. The headache vanished that day, but the epilepsy didn't. The seizures didn't. The fear of dropping to the floor in the middle of a classroom in front of everyone didn't. I relieved the symptom for a few hours and thought I'd rewritten her history.
What arrogance.
Derek showed up and offered a real cure. Not temporary relief from a boy she barely knew, but a complete transformation. A new body. A life without fear. And she took it, just like anyone in her shoes would have.
I rested my forehead against the cold metal of a locker and closed my eyes for three seconds.
Erica was one of the people I actually wanted to protect. Since that day in the library, since she looked at me with those eyes of someone who had finally been seen by someone, I knew she mattered. Not as a piece on the board, not as a tactical asset. She mattered simply because she did. Because I had held her mana in my hands and felt how much she suffered, and that creates a kind of responsibility you can't just pretend doesn't exist.
And now she was a werewolf. Derek Hale's Beta. In a pack led by an emotionally unstable Alpha who recruited desperate teenagers because he couldn't keep adult allies.
I opened my eyes. Pushed off the locker.
There was no point ruminating. The Bite had been given; what's done is done. The question now was different: what was Erica going to do with this new power, and what was Derek going to do with her?
And, in a corner of my mind I didn't want to acknowledge, a third question: did she know I was at school? Did she feel my presence the same way I was feeling hers?
Because if Derek's Bite cured her epilepsy and sharpened her senses, then the scent of ozone and mana I carried with me was probably the most recognizable thing in the entire building to a wolf's nose that had smelled it before. Up close. In the library. When I was holding her hands.
I shoved the thought to the back of my mind and walked toward Harris's room.
Erica could wait until break. Harris could not.
I arrived at Harris's class seven minutes late. He peered over his glasses at me with an expression that said the rest of his day had just vastly improved because now he had someone to torture.
"Mr. Salt. How wonderful of you to grace us with your presence."
"Sorry, sir. Parking lot trouble."
"Detention. Wednesday. Take a seat."
I sat down at my desk in the back without arguing. It wasn't worth the energy. Harris turned back to the board and started lecturing about ionic bonds with the sheer enthusiasm of someone reading a medicine leaflet.
I opened my notebook. The pencil started moving on its own, the mana doing the grunt work while I stared out the window. The Beacon Hills sky was trapped in its permanent dreary gray, the woods of the preserve looming on the horizon like a dark green wall.
Class dragged on. Harris aimed two questions at me, probably trying to catch me off guard, but I answered both on autopilot. Chemistry was easy when you understood the molecular structure of things on a level that went far beyond a microscope.
The bell rang. I packed my things and stepped out into the hall.
The stream of students swallowed me up. The chatter, sneakers squeaking on linoleum, lockers slamming. I was heading toward the cafeteria when the scent changed.
It wasn't a physical smell. It was mana. That new note, hot and golden, that I'd felt from the first floor, was moving. Coming down. Coming my way.
I stopped near the stairwell connecting the two floors. Students rushed past me, not paying attention, a river of indifferent faces.
And then she appeared at the top of the stairs.
I almost didn't recognize her.
The Erica I knew wore oversized hoodies, her hair carelessly tied back, her shoulders hunched like she was constantly apologizing for existing. The girl walking down those steps was someone else entirely. Her blonde hair was down, styled in loose waves, falling over her shoulders with a volume I'd never seen on her. Her clothes were different tight, dark, the kind of outfit the old Erica would never have dared to wear. Her posture had completely overhauled. Spine straight, chin high, confident footsteps that clicked against the stairs.
She was smiling. Not the fragile, nervous smile of someone hoping to go unnoticed. A wide, toothy grin of someone who had discovered a secret the rest of the world didn't know.
The students around us noticed. Heads turned. A guy from the lacrosse team literally tripped over his own feet staring at her. A girl nudged her friend and discreetly pointed.
Erica Reyes was walking down the school stairs like she owned the place.
And then she saw me.
The smile didn't fade. It shifted. It grew smaller, more intimate, and her eyes locked onto mine with a familiarity that caught me completely off guard. It wasn't the look of a stranger. It was the look of someone who remembered exactly who I was and what I'd done for her in that library.
She didn't look away. Didn't get shy. She descended the rest of the steps and walked straight toward me with that new swagger her werewolf body had given her, and I realized she was coming to talk to me.
Not Scott. Not Stiles. Not any of the guys currently craning their necks to watch her.
Me.
She stopped right in front of me. Close enough that I could feel the heat of her lupine aura radiating off her like a freshly lit bonfire. Her perfume was new too, something the old Erica didn't wear.
"Hey, Nate." Her voice was the same. Fuller, steadier, but the same. And the nickname she had used that day in the library, the one no one else at school used except Allison, sounded like she'd been saving it this whole time.
"Erica." I replied, keeping my tone strictly neutral, even though my brain was recalculating everything inside. "You look different."
"I know." The grin returned, and this time I caught a glimpse of her fangs. Just a fraction of a second, a quick flash no one else noticed, but it was clearly meant for me. She was showing off. "A good kind of different."
"Looks like it."
She tilted her head to the side, studying me with those eyes that now carried an amber glow underneath the brown. Her nose twitched, just slightly, almost imperceptibly, pulling in the air.
She was scenting me.
And judging by the way her smile widened, she found exactly what she was looking for. The ozone, the mana, the scent she had inhaled for the first time when I held her hands across a library table and made her headache disappear.
"We need to talk," she said. Not a request. A statement of fact.
"We do," I agreed.
"Not now. I have class." She took a step to the side, clearing a path to walk past me, but stopped with her shoulder almost brushing mine. "But later."
"Later."
She continued down the hall. I just stood there, watching her weave through the crowd. Students parted ways for her without even realizing it, basic animal instinct kicking in even for people who didn't know werewolves existed.
I let out a slow breath.
The morning had started less than two hours ago, and I had already hidden a Banshee, wrangled a potential Kanima, and discovered that the girl I thought I'd saved from becoming a werewolf was now exactly that.
And she wanted to talk.
I rubbed a hand over my face, feeling the weight of the day stacking onto a body that still hadn't recovered from the previous one.
The grand plan I'd sketched out in the kitchen with my parents was fracturing before lunch. Isaac as a moldable Alpha, the faction built in the shadows, the pieces aligned with surgical precision. None of that accounted for Erica crashing into the equation like this. Not as a piece on the board. As a person. Someone who remembered what I did, who came to me of her own free will, and who now wielded a power I didn't control.
The cafeteria could wait. Food could wait.
I needed five minutes alone to reset the board before any other piece decided to move on its own.
I walked into the nearest guys' bathroom, pushed the door open, and leaned against the sink.
The mirror stared back with a tired face, faint dark circles, and the dulled gleam of the Reserve Ring on my index finger.
"Right," I muttered to my reflection. "Plan B."
The reflection didn't answer. But the semester was only just beginning, and I already had the distinct feeling that the universe of Beacon Hills took a sadistic pleasure in obliterating any plans I made before breakfast.
_________________________________________
Well, I already had half of this chapter written in my notes, so it was pretty easy to wrap it up. I always jot down my ideas, but it's gonna take a while for the next update because I need to reread the fic, check where I left off in the show, and see what I actually had planned in my notes. But to make up for the wait, I promise a 10k-word chapter next time!