The lacrosse stick felt wrong in my hands.
Not wrong like broken. Wrong like it didn't belong to me yet. Like I was holding someone else's future and pretending it fit. I sat cross-legged on my bed in nothing but gym shorts, pulling the lace through the mesh for the third time because the first two attempts left the pocket too tight, and a tight pocket meant dropped catches, and dropped catches meant another season on the bench watching Jackson Whittemore score goals that should have been mine.
Not that they should have been mine. That was the problem. Nothing about my athletic career suggested I deserved anything other than the view from the sideline. But wanting something and deserving it are two different wounds, and I'd been bleeding from both for years.
I tugged the last lace through, tested the give with my fingers, and tossed the stick onto the comforter. It bounced once and settled against my pillow like it was already tired of me.
The chin-up bar was next. I'd mounted it on the bathroom doorframe at the start of summer after watching a YouTube video about lacrosse conditioning that made first-line players look like minor Greek gods. Three months later, I could do twelve reps without my arms shaking. Twelve. Jackson probably did twelve in his sleep. But twelve was six more than I could do in June, and that had to count for something.
I pulled myself up. One. The tendons in my forearms stretched tight. Two. My reflection in the bathroom mirror caught the bottom of my chin each time I crested the bar. Three. Four. I watched myself rise and fall, rise and fall, and tried to see a first-line player in the mirror. All I saw was a kid who needed a haircut and a better plan.
After I hit twelve, I dropped down, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and stood there for a moment with water dripping off my chin, staring at the version of myself that would have to walk into Beacon Hills High School tomorrow and pretend he wasn't terrified. First day of sophomore year. New classes, new teachers, same bench.
I killed the bathroom light and headed for bed.
That's when I heard it.
A sound outside. Not loud, not close, but specific in a way that made the back of my neck prickle. A scraping, like shoes on the porch railing, followed by a thud that was too heavy to be a raccoon and too clumsy to be a burglar. I stood motionless next to my bed for three full seconds, listening, running through the options. We lived in a quiet neighborhood. Mom was working the night shift at the hospital. I was alone.
I grabbed the baseball bat from behind my door, the wooden Louisville Slugger that had lived in various corners of my room since Little League. I hadn't swung it at a ball in four years, but the weight of it in my hands was familiar and solid, and something about the heft of a weapon, even a ridiculous one, makes you feel like you have a say in what happens next.
I pulled on my red hoodie, zipped it halfway, and stepped out onto the front porch with the bat cocked over my right shoulder.
The night air hit me. Cool, damp, carrying the mineral smell of incoming rain. I scanned the yard, the driveway, the strip of sidewalk visible past the hedge. Nothing. No movement. I was about to lower the bat and call myself paranoid when a figure dropped from directly above me.
Upside down. Hanging from the porch roof by his knees.
"AHH!"
I swung.
"AHHH!"
The figure screamed back, which was the only reason I didn't connect with his skull, because I recognized the pitch of that scream. I had heard it in every haunted house, every horror movie, every time a spider appeared within six feet of his personal space since the second grade.
Stiles Stilinski. Hanging from my porch roof like a deranged bat.
"Stiles, what the hell are you doing?!"
He was already looking at the Louisville Slugger like it had personally offended him. "You weren't answering your phone! Why do you have a bat?"
"I thought you were a predator!"
The word landed between us, and I watched Stiles' face cycle through at least four expressions in two seconds. Confusion. Offense. A brief flicker of something that might have been flattery. Then pure, distilled incredulity.
"A pre... Wha?"
He stared at me. I stared at him. The porch light hummed.
Then he shook it off the way he shook off everything, by pivoting so fast the previous topic didn't have time to object.
"Look, I know it's late, but you gotta hear this. I saw my dad leave twenty minutes ago. Dispatch called. They're bringing in every officer from the Beacon Department, and even state police."
I lowered the bat. "For what?"
Stiles' eyes did the thing they always did when he had information that was going to ruin my night. They got wider, brighter, practically incandescent with barely contained glee that he was trying and failing to disguise as concern.
"Two joggers found a body in the woods."
He said it like other people say "I won the lottery." He reached up, freed his legs from the trellis, and dropped onto the porch in front of me with a gracelessness that would have been alarming if I wasn't used to it.
"What, a dead body?"
Stiles leaned on the railing, bringing himself to my eye level, and gave me a look of such withering sarcasm that I felt it in my chest.
"No, a body of water." He rolled his eyes. "Yes, dumbass, a dead body."
The night was suddenly heavier. The air tasted different, or maybe that was just the adrenaline doing something chemical to the back of my tongue. A body. In Beacon Hills. Things like that didn't happen here. This was a town where the biggest crime wave in recent memory was someone stealing lawn gnomes from the Petersons' yard.
"You mean, like, murdered?"
"Nobody knows yet. Just that it was a girl, probably in her twenties."
I frowned. "Hold on, if they found the body, then what are they looking for?"
And there it was. The thing Stiles had been holding in his mouth like a kid with a secret candy, waiting for exactly the right moment to reveal it. His voice dropped half an octave, and the glee he'd been suppressing broke through his face like sunrise.
"That's the best part. They only found half."
Half.
Half a body.
My brain tried to process that image and mostly refused. Stiles watched me struggle with it for about a second and a half before his tone shifted, becoming the tone he used when he'd already decided what we were doing and the conversation was just a formality.
"We're going."
~
I should have said no.
I should have said, "Stiles, it is eleven o'clock at night, there is a potential murderer in the woods, I have school tomorrow, and I need my lungs to function for lacrosse tryouts." I should have walked back inside, locked the door, and gone to bed like a person with a functioning survival instinct.
Instead, I was sitting in the passenger seat of Stiles' Jeep, watching the headlights carve a tunnel through the darkness as we pulled into the Beacon Hills Preserve. The sign at the entrance, the one that explicitly said not to enter after dark, lit up in the Jeep's high beams like a prophecy I was choosing to ignore.
"We're seriously doing this?"
Stiles was already out of the car, flashlight in hand, walking with a purpose that I found both impressive and deeply concerning. "You're the one always bitching that nothing ever happens in this town."
"I was trying to get a good night's sleep before practice tomorrow."
He didn't even look back. "Right, 'cause sitting on the bench is such a grueling effort."
That one landed. It always did. Not because Stiles meant it to hurt, but because truth has its own weight regardless of intent, and the truth was that I'd sat on that bench for an entire season last year. Watched every game from five feet away, close enough to smell the grass and the sweat and the victory that other people earned, and all I'd contributed was my presence and the occasional encouraging shout that nobody heard over the crowd.
"No, because I'm playing this year. In fact, I'm making first line."
Even saying it out loud felt reckless. Like I was taunting the universe.
Stiles glanced back at me with an expression I knew well. It was the expression of someone who loved me enough to let me have my dream and respected me enough not to pretend it was realistic.
"Hey, that's the spirit! Everyone should have a dream, even a pathetically unrealistic one."
We walked in silence after that, and the silence was where the woods started to become real. Not the woods from the car window, which were just dark shapes and vague depth. The actual woods. The kind that have been here since before Beacon Hills was Beacon Hills, since before anyone thought to name the trees or pave the roads or put up signs telling people not to enter after dark.
The sounds came in layers. Insects first, the constant hum that you stopped noticing until you noticed it. Then branches creaking overhead, not from wind but from weight, from things living in them, moving through them. And underneath all of it, the absence of human noise, the silence of a place where we were not supposed to be.
"Just out of curiosity," I said, matching Stiles' sarcasm beat for beat because it was either that or acknowledge the fear, "which half of the body are we looking for?"
Stiles' stride faltered for exactly one step. "Huh. I didn't even think about that."
"And, uh... what if whoever killed the body is still out here?"
"Also something I didn't think about."
"It's comforting to know you've planned this out with your usual attention to detail."
"I know."
We started up a hill, and my lungs immediately filed a formal complaint. The air was thicker here, damper, like the woods were breathing on me, and my bronchial tubes, which had never been what anyone would call reliable, began to tighten. My breathing went shallow. Then rapid. Then wheezy, the kind of wheezing that sounds like someone slowly letting air out of a balloon, and I hated that sound more than almost anything because it was the sound of my body betraying me at the exact moment I needed it to cooperate.
"Maybe the severe asthmatic should be the one holding the flashlight, huh?"
I leaned against a tree and dug my inhaler out of my pocket. Two puffs. The medication hit my lungs like a cold promise, opening the airways just enough to remind me what normal breathing felt like before the tightness crept back in at the edges. Stiles was already ten yards ahead, because Stiles never waited for my lungs. Not out of cruelty. Out of the same manic momentum that made him Stiles.
We saw the flashlights at the same time. A handful of beams cutting through the dark, the search party fanning out through the trees ahead. Stiles and I dropped behind a fallen tree, pressing ourselves into the damp bark and dead leaves.
"Wait!" I hissed.
"Come on!"
He was already moving, vaulting over the tree and running toward the lights with the self-preservation instincts of a lemming who'd heard there was something interesting at the bottom of the cliff.
"Stiles! Wait up! Stiles!"
I took another hit from the inhaler and scrambled after him, whispering his name as loudly as a whisper allowed, which turned out to be not loudly enough, because the next thing I heard was barking. Loud, aggressive, K9-unit barking, followed by the unmistakable sound of Stiles hitting the ground.
"Hold it right there!"
A flashlight beam pinned Stiles to the dirt like a spotlight on the world's least convincing criminal. I pressed my back against the nearest tree, closed my eyes, and held my breath as though invisibility was something you could achieve through sheer commitment to stillness.
"Hang on, hang on..."
Sheriff Stilinski's voice. Tired, resigned, carrying the particular brand of exhaustion that only parents of Stiles Stilinski could authentically produce.
"This little delinquent belongs to me."
I stayed behind the tree. I heard Stiles try to talk his way out of it, heard the Sheriff ask where his "usual partner in crime" was, heard Stiles lie about me being home, and I stayed perfectly still, because getting caught would mean a conversation with my mom that I did not have the energy for.
"Scott, you out there? Scott?"
The Sheriff's flashlight swept the trees around me. I didn't move. Didn't breathe. After a long moment, he gave up, grabbed Stiles by the back of the neck, and steered him back toward the parking lot, something about "invasion of privacy" fading into the distance.
And then I was alone.
I hit the back of my head against the bark. "Damn."
The word evaporated into the dark, and the dark didn't give it back.
~
The rain started without warning.
Not a gradual build. Not a polite drizzle working its way up to something heavier. One moment the air was damp and still, and the next, the sky opened like it had been holding its breath all night and finally exhaled. Water hammered down through the canopy, finding every gap in the leaves, turning the ground under my feet into something between mud and memory. Thunder rolled overhead, low and heavy, the kind you felt in your molars before you heard it in your ears.
I pulled up my hood and started walking.
The path Stiles and I had taken to get here was somewhere behind me, but "somewhere" isn't a direction, and the dark has a way of making every direction feel like the wrong one. I moved carefully, one hand out in front of me, my phone in the other, the flashlight app creating a weak circle of blue-white light that illuminated about four feet of rain-soaked ground before surrendering to the blackness.
The sounds of the forest had changed. The insects were gone, or at least silent, and the rain dominated everything, creating a white noise that swallowed the details. I couldn't hear branches creak. Couldn't hear movement. Couldn't hear anything except water hitting leaves hitting earth hitting water.
Then even the rain sounds stopped mattering, because everything went quiet.
Not quiet like the absence of noise. Quiet like something had taken the noise and removed it. Like the forest had been muted by a hand on the volume dial, leaving only the rain and my own breathing and a silence underneath both that felt intentional. Predatory.
I stopped walking. My hand found my inhaler. I shook it, ready to take a hit, because my lungs were tightening again and I couldn't tell if it was the asthma or the fear, and then the ground started shaking.
No. Not the ground. The things on the ground.
Deer. A dozen of them, maybe more, crashing through the underbrush at full speed, eyes wide and white in the dark, hooves churning the mud into spray. They weren't running somewhere. They were running from something. And I was directly in their path.
I didn't have time to move. The first one hit me in the chest with its shoulder, spinning me sideways. The second clipped my hip. I went down hard, face-first into wet leaves and mud, and the herd ran over me, their hooves striking my back, my arms, the ground inches from my head. I curled into a ball and covered my skull with both hands and waited for it to end.
When it did, I lay there. Rain on my face. Mud in my mouth. Every part of my body reporting damage. My inhaler was gone. I'd felt it leave my hand when the first deer hit me, felt it arc away into the dark, and without it, my lungs were on a timer. I had maybe twenty minutes of hard breathing before things got genuinely dangerous.
I pushed myself up and started looking.
My phone's flashlight swept the ground. Mud. Leaves. Broken branches. I moved toward the area where I thought the inhaler had landed, kicking through a pile of wet debris, and my foot hit something that wasn't a branch.
I looked down.
A face looked back.
Not a whole face. Half a person. A young woman, white, dark hair plastered to her skin by the rain, her body ending at the waist in a way that my brain absolutely refused to process. Her eyes were open. Her mouth was open. And the expression frozen on what was left of her face was not pain or surprise but something worse. Something that looked like she had seen what was coming and understood, in that final moment, that understanding didn't matter.
The scream that came out of me wasn't voluntary. It was mechanical, the sound a body makes when it encounters something that its operating system was never designed to handle. I stumbled backward, my feet sliding on the wet slope behind me, and then I was falling, rolling, tumbling down a hillside I hadn't known was there, branches whipping my face and my arms as gravity made decisions for me.
I hit the bottom of the ravine on my back. The impact emptied my lungs completely, and for three horrible seconds, I couldn't breathe at all. Not asthma. Physics. The fall had knocked every molecule of air out of me, and my diaphragm sat there, stunned, before it remembered its job and lurched back into motion.
I gasped. Coughed. Rolled onto my side and spat mud and rainwater. My ribs ached. My right elbow was throbbing. I used a fallen tree trunk to pull myself up and stood there, swaying, trying to make sense of what had just happened, trying not to see the woman's face every time I closed my eyes.
I needed to move. I needed to get out of these woods and get home and call someone, call 911, call Stiles, call anyone who could help me unsee what I had just seen. I started walking again, faster now, not caring about the direction, just needing to put distance between myself and that clearing.
That's when I saw the light.
Not a flashlight. Not moonlight filtered through clouds. Something else entirely. A green light, sharp and precise, pulsing through the rain like a heartbeat made visible. It was coming from somewhere to my left, lower than eye level, partially hidden by a cluster of ferns at the base of an old oak tree.
I should have kept walking. Every survival instinct I possessed, which admittedly wasn't many, was screaming at me to ignore it, to get to the road, to get out. But the light was wrong. Wrong for the woods, wrong for the night, wrong for anything I had a category for. And there is something in the human brain, some suicidal little circuit buried deep in the limbic system, that responds to the unknown not with retreat but with approach.
I pushed through the ferns.
It was a crater. Small, maybe three feet across, the earth scorched black in a perfect circle around whatever had impacted there. Steam rose from the edges where the rain hit the hot soil. And sitting in the exact center, half-buried in the charred dirt, was a device.
It looked like a watch. An oversized, alien-looking watch with a faceplate that bore a symbol I didn't recognize. An hourglass shape, glowing green, the source of the light that had drawn me here. The casing was white and black, smooth, like nothing that should exist at the bottom of a hole in the Beacon Hills Preserve.
I crouched at the edge of the crater. Rain ran down my face and dripped off my chin. The heat rising from the scorched earth was real, tangible, pressing against my skin like the woods themselves were running a fever.
Don't touch it.
That was the thought. Clear, rational, obvious. Something fell from the sky and burned a hole in the ground and is glowing green. Do not touch it. Call someone. Leave it alone. Walk away.
My hand reached for it anyway.
Not because I decided to. Because my body moved before my mind finished its list of reasons not to, and in the half-second gap between thought and action, my fingers closed around the device.
It was warm. Not hot, not burning, but warm in a way that felt intentional, like it had been waiting for contact. The surface was impossibly smooth under my fingertips. I lifted it out of the dirt, turned it over in my hand, and the green hourglass pulsed brighter, like a heart beating faster when you hold it.
Then it opened.
The faceplate split along a seam I hadn't seen, and the hourglass symbol rose on a cylindrical column, elevating itself two inches above the base. The green glow intensified, throwing sharp shadows across the crater, painting the rain itself in emerald. And I understood, with a certainty that I had no reason to possess, that it was waiting for me to do something.
I stared at it. Rain hammered my shoulders. My lungs wheezed. Somewhere behind me, half a dead woman lay in the dark. And I was crouching in a crater holding something that had fallen from the sky.
My thumb pressed the hourglass down.
The device launched itself at my wrist.
I screamed. Again. The thing clamped onto my left forearm like a jaw, the bands wrapping around my wrist and fusing together with a sound that was part mechanical and part organic, a wet, clicking finality that communicated permanence. I grabbed it with my right hand and pulled. Nothing. I braced my foot against a root and pulled harder. Nothing. The thing was attached to me, bonded to my skin, and the green light was pulsing in sync with my heartbeat now, faster and faster as my panic escalated.
"Get off. Get off get off get off."
I yanked at it. Twisted it. Tried to slide my fingers under the band to pry it loose. The device didn't budge. It sat on my wrist like it had always been there, like my arm had been built with a slot for it and it had simply filled the vacancy.
And then the dial, the raised hourglass column, began to project.
A silhouette appeared above the faceplate. Small, holographic, rendered in green light. A shape. Humanoid but not human. Broad shoulders, a head that tapered differently than any head I'd ever seen, and flames. The silhouette was wreathed in fire.
I didn't mean to touch it.
My hand was already on the dial from trying to rip the thing off my arm, and when the silhouette appeared, my fingers twitched. Involuntary. A flinch. But a flinch was enough. My palm pressed the dial down, and the world turned green.
~
The sensation was annihilation.
Not pain. Beyond pain. Every cell in my body deconstructed itself simultaneously, and for a fraction of a second that lasted longer than any fraction of a second had a right to last, I was nothing. Not unconscious. Not asleep. Nothing. A gap in the continuity of being Scott McCall, a blank space where a person used to be.
Then the reconstruction.
It started in my chest. Heat. Impossible heat, the kind that should have killed me, blooming outward from my sternum like a second sun igniting behind my ribs. It raced down my arms, my legs, up my neck and into my skull, and everywhere it went, it rewrote me. I felt my skin harden and crack. Felt my fingers lengthen and separate. Felt my skeleton shift and reform into an architecture that human bones were never meant to occupy.
When it ended, I was not myself.
I was tall. Taller than I'd ever been, taller than anyone I'd ever met, and the ground was further away than it should have been. My hands, no, these were not hands. These were weapons. Massive, rocky, radiating heat that turned the raindrops into steam before they could touch me. My arms were covered in something that looked like volcanic rock, dark and cracked, and through the cracks, I could see fire. Actual fire. Living inside me, visible through fissures in whatever my skin had become.
The rain evaporated on contact. Every drop that hit me turned to steam instantly, creating a hissing, boiling halo around my body. I could feel the heat pouring off me in waves, and the ferns that had been two feet from where I stood were already browning at the edges, curling away from me like they were afraid.
I looked at my hands.
Flames danced on my palms. Not burning me. Coming from me. I was the source. The fire wasn't attacking my body. It was my body. I opened my mouth to scream and instead, a plume of flame erupted upward, scorching the underside of the oak's lowest branch and sending a shower of sparks into the wet night air.
I fell backward, landed on the ground, and the impact sent cracks radiating through the earth in every direction, the soil baking dry in a perfect circle around me.
This wasn't real. This couldn't be real. I was hallucinating. The asthma had cut off oxygen to my brain and I was lying in the mud somewhere having a medical event, and this, all of this, was the last firing of neurons in a dying brain.
But the heat was too real. The weight of this body was too real. The way the steam rose off me, the way the fire moved when I moved my fingers, the way I could feel the rain dying against my skin. Hallucinations don't have physics. Dreams don't burn branches.
I stood up. Slowly. The body moved differently than mine. Heavier in some ways, lighter in others, like gravity had renegotiated its terms and reached a new agreement. I took a step. The ground under my foot cracked and hissed.
"What..."
My voice. Not my voice. Something deeper, rougher, carrying a resonance that vibrated in my chest and in the air simultaneously. I could feel the sound in the trees around me, feel them leaning away from the frequency.
"What is happening to me?"
I held my hands in front of my face. The flames on my palms intensified, as if responding to the fear, and I realized with a lurch of something beyond panic that I didn't know how to turn them off. I didn't know how to turn any of this off. The fire, the heat, the body, the thing on my wrist that had done this. I was a sixteen-year-old asthmatic standing in the middle of a rainstorm wrapped in a body made of volcanic rock and living flame, and I had no idea how to stop being whatever I had become.
A tree to my right ignited. I hadn't touched it. Hadn't meant to do anything. But the panic was feeding the flames, and the flames were responding to the panic, and the loop was tightening with every second. Fire leapt from my shoulders to the nearest branch, caught, spread. I stumbled backward and the motion threw a wave of heat that scorched the bark of three trees simultaneously.
I was going to burn the whole forest down.
The realization hit me like a physical thing, and the horror of it, the image of the Beacon Hills Preserve reduced to ash because I couldn't control a body that wasn't mine, did something unexpected. It cut through the panic. Not eliminated it. Just interrupted it long enough for something else to surface.
Stop. Breathe. Think.
Mom's voice. Not literally, not a hallucination, but the memory of every time she'd talked me through an asthma attack, every time the wheezing got bad enough that the edges of my vision started to darken and she'd knelt in front of me and put her hands on my shoulders and said those three words in that exact order.
I closed my eyes. Or whatever the equivalent was in this body. The world went dark behind lids I couldn't feel, and I focused on the only thing I knew how to focus on: breathing. Not this body's breathing. My breathing. The rhythm I'd learned in a dozen hospital waiting rooms, in the back of ambulances, on the bathroom floor at three in the morning with Mom's hand on my back.
In. Hold. Out. Slow.
The flames dimmed. Not much. But enough to notice.
In. Hold. Out. Slower.
The heat inside my chest pulled inward, contracted, became less wild and more contained. The fire on my hands reduced from a bonfire to a candle. The tree to my right was still burning, but the rain was already fighting it, steam rising in thick columns as water met flame and won.
I stood there in the rain, in a body made of fire, and I breathed.
And for one moment, just one, I felt something other than terror. I felt the fire listen to me. Felt it respond not to the panic but to the calm, bending where I bent, dimming where I dimmed, and in that single moment, I understood something that I wouldn't fully grasp for a long time yet: whatever this thing on my wrist was, whatever it had turned me into, it wasn't separate from me. It was responding to me. To what I felt. To who I was.
Then the watch beeped.
A red light pulsed where the green had been. Then again. Faster. An urgent, rhythmic flashing, like a warning, like a countdown, and I felt the heat inside me stutter. Flicker. The fire on my hands died. The cracks in my skin began to seal, the light inside them dimming.
Then a flash of red light consumed everything.
The process reversed. The heat contracted, pulled inward, collapsed into the center of my chest and vanished. My body shrank, softened, became fragile and small and human and mine. I felt the rain hit my skin, my actual skin, and it was cold, brutally cold after the furnace I'd been living inside, and I gasped at the contact like someone had thrown ice water in my face.
I was on my knees. In the mud. In the rain. Shaking. My hands were my hands again, pale and unmarked. My red hoodie was intact, which made no sense, which was one more impossible thing on a pile of impossible things that I didn't have the capacity to process. The only evidence that any of it had happened was the device on my wrist, its faceplate now pulsing a dim, sullen red, and the circle of scorched earth around me where my fire had baked the ground dry.
And the burning tree. That was still real. The rain was winning, the flames hissing and retreating under the downpour, but the blackened bark and the smell of smoke were proof that I hadn't imagined it. Something had changed me. Something had made me into a thing that could set the world on fire by panicking, and then it had changed me back, and the only explanation sat on my wrist blinking red like a machine that needed to sleep.
I stared at the device. It stared back. The red light pulsed. Slow. Tired.
"What are you?" I whispered.
The forest didn't answer. The rain didn't answer. The thing on my wrist didn't answer.
I pulled myself to my feet. My legs were shaking. Everything was shaking. I needed to get home. I needed to get to a place with walls and a roof and a lock on the door, a place where things made sense, where watches didn't fall from the sky and turn you into something that burned.
I started walking. The direction was a guess, but any direction away from this clearing was the right one. My lungs were tight, my asthma pressing in now that my body was my own again. No inhaler. Nothing to do about it except breathe shallow and move fast and hope the tree line was closer than it felt.
The trees thinned. I was heading the right way. I could see open sky ahead through the canopy, could sense the change in terrain that meant I was approaching the edge of the preserve. Twenty more yards. Fifteen. Ten.
The growl came from behind me.
Low. Deep. Not loud. That was the worst part. It wasn't trying to scare me. It didn't need to. The sound traveled through the ground before it reached my ears, up through the soles of my shoes and into the bones of my ankles and my shins and my spine, until it arrived at the base of my skull where the oldest part of my brain lived. The part that didn't think. The part that remembered, in some ancestral, preverbal way, what it meant to be prey. What it meant to be chosen by something that didn't need to announce itself because it had already decided how this ended.
I stopped.
Every muscle in my body locked. Not by choice. Not by thought. By something deeper than both, a biological override that shut down voluntary movement because voluntary movement was the thing that triggered the chase. I couldn't run. Couldn't turn. Couldn't breathe. I stood in the rain with my back to whatever had made that sound, and I waited, because waiting was the only thing my body would let me do.
Slowly, against every screaming nerve, I turned around.
Red eyes.
Two points of crimson light, low to the ground, burning through the curtain of rain with an intensity that had nothing to do with reflection. These weren't eyes that caught light. These were eyes that generated it, that glowed from something internal, something that lived behind the pupils and didn't care whether I understood it. They were the color of arterial blood, the color of emergency lights, the color of every warning system that evolution had ever built into the human brain. And they were fixed on me with a focus that was not curious, not aggressive, not anything I could name. It was patient. The focus of something that knew I had nowhere to go and was in no rush to prove it.
The shape materialized around the eyes. Massive. Lupine but wrong. Too big to be a wolf, too heavy in the shoulders, too deliberate in its stillness. The body looked like it had been assembled from shadow and sinew, the rain sliding off its back in sheets, its legs planted in the mud with the solidity of something that owned the ground it stood on. It was maybe fifteen feet away. Close enough that I could hear it breathe, a slow, wet rhythm that sounded less like respiration and more like anticipation.
I had time for one thought.
The watch.
My right hand moved to my left wrist. I slapped the faceplate. Nothing. Slapped it again, harder, my palm stinging against the casing. The hourglass symbol was dark, the red pulse barely visible, the device still cycling through whatever recovery it needed after the transformation. I pressed the dial. Twisted it. Hit it with the heel of my hand. Nothing. No hologram. No green light. No column rising from the surface.
The thing on my wrist had turned me into a creature that could melt stone, and now, when I was standing fifteen feet from something that wanted to kill me, it sat there dead. Useless. A piece of alien jewelry that had decided this wasn't its problem.
The beast didn't give me time to try again.
It moved. Not ran. Launched. The distance between us ceased to exist in a single motion, fifteen feet of air compressed into something instantaneous, and the impact hit me in the center of my chest like a car. Not like being pushed. Like being struck by something that had weight and speed and intent behind it, and my feet left the ground, and the world tilted, and I hit the earth on my back so hard that the mud cratered beneath me.
It was on top of me before I finished landing. The weight of it was absolute. Not just heavy. Smothering. It pressed me into the ground with the dispassionate thoroughness of something that understood leverage, that knew exactly how much force was required to make a human body stop resisting. I could feel its ribcage expanding against mine with each breath it took. Its forelimbs pinned my shoulders. Its claws, buried in the mud on either side of my head, were longer than my fingers.
Its face was inches from mine.
The breath hit me first. Hot, wet, carrying a smell that was part rotting meat and part something older, something mineral, like blood that had been sitting in the sun. Saliva dripped from teeth that I could see in terrible detail, long and curved and yellowed, designed not for chewing but for tearing, for gripping, for holding something down while the rest of the body did its work. The red eyes filled my entire field of vision, and at this distance, I could see that they weren't solid red. There was depth to them. Layers. Something moved behind those eyes, something intelligent, something that was looking at me and seeing me, not as a threat, not as food, but as something else entirely. Something it wanted.
I tried to scream. What came out was a sound too strangled and too thin to qualify. The weight on my chest had compressed my lungs past the point where they could produce anything useful, and the asthma was tightening around what little air I had left, and I was drowning on dry land, pinned to the earth by something that shouldn't exist.
I tried to crawl. My hands clawed at the mud, fingers digging furrows in the wet earth, and I managed to drag myself maybe six inches before the thing grabbed me. Not bit. Grabbed. Its jaws closed around my left ankle, not hard enough to break bone but hard enough to communicate that breaking bone was available if needed, and it pulled me backward through the mud with a single jerk of its head, undoing my six inches of progress like I had never moved at all.
The message was clear. You don't leave until I'm done.
It released my ankle. I scrambled, instinct overriding the message, and I got one foot underneath me, almost stood, almost made it to something resembling upright before the thing moved again.
The bite came from the side, low, aimed with a precision that suggested this was not random. Not a wild animal attacking wherever its mouth happened to land. It chose the spot. My right hip, the soft tissue just above the bone, where the skin was thin and the nerves were dense and the blood ran close to the surface.
Its teeth sank in.
The pain was a white flash behind my eyes, a total system override that erased everything else. Not sharp. Not clean. This was a deep pain, an excavating pain, the kind that doesn't stop at the wound but radiates outward through your entire nervous system until your fingers hurt and your teeth hurt and the backs of your eyes hurt. I felt the teeth penetrate skin, felt them push through the muscle underneath, felt them scrape against something that might have been bone, and at every layer the pain multiplied, built on itself, compounded into something that my brain had no reference point for.
But worse than the pain, worse than the physical fact of teeth in my body, was the sensation underneath it. Something entering me. Not venom, not saliva, not anything I could rationalize as biological. Something else. A feeling like heat, but not the heat I'd felt as the fire creature. This was different. This was alive. It moved through the wound and into my bloodstream and I felt it travel, felt it spreading from the bite outward through my body, a warmth that didn't belong to me, that my cells recognized as foreign and recoiled from but couldn't stop. It reached my chest and my heart stuttered, skipped a beat, then resumed at a rhythm that was subtly, impossibly different from the one I'd had my entire life.
"AHHHHH!"
The scream tore out of me with enough force to scrape my throat raw. The beast released its grip. Its teeth withdrew from my hip, and the pain of extraction was almost as bad as the pain of entry, a wet pulling sensation that made me want to vomit. I felt blood rush into the void the teeth had left, hot against my skin, soaking through my hoodie and my jeans.
The thing stepped back. One step. Two. It stood over me for a moment, rain dripping off its muzzle, those red eyes studying me with an expression I could not read and did not want to understand. Then it turned, unhurried, and walked back into the trees. Not running. Not fleeing. Leaving. The way something leaves when it has finished what it came to do.
I lay in the mud and watched it disappear.
The forest swallowed it without a sound. The red eyes dimmed, faded, vanished, and then it was just the rain again, just the dark, just me on the ground with a hole in my hip and a device on my wrist and the slow, sick realization that whatever had just happened, it hadn't been random. The creature had chosen to bite me. Had held me down, positioned its mouth, selected the spot. Had pushed something into me through the wound that I could still feel moving, settling, making itself at home in places where it had not been invited.
And then it had let me go. Not because I fought it off. Not because it was interrupted. Because it was finished.
That was the part that scared me more than the pain. More than the blood. More than the red eyes and the teeth and the weight. The fact that it had done exactly what it wanted to do, and then walked away.
I lay there for what felt like a long time but was probably thirty seconds. The rain washed the mud from my face. The blood from my hip pooled in the hollow of my stomach where my hoodie had ridden up. The watch on my wrist pulsed red, then flickered, then pulsed green. Faint. Tentative. Like a machine clearing its throat.
I got up.
Not gracefully. Not bravely. I rolled onto my side, pressed my hands into the mud, and pushed myself to my knees, then to my feet, and the pain in my hip was so immediate and so total that my vision whited out for a full second before it came back. I pressed my right hand against the wound and felt the blood seeping between my fingers, warm and steady. Not spurting. Not arterial. But constant enough to be a problem if I didn't get somewhere soon.
I started running.
The pain made it a stumbling, lurching thing, not really running but something too fast to be walking, my right leg partially dragging because the muscles around the bite had decided they were done cooperating. I crashed through the underbrush at the edge of the preserve and onto asphalt, and the solid ground under my feet felt like a promise, like the first true thing I'd encountered all night.
Headlights.
A burgundy SUV, coming fast. I was in the middle of the road before I registered the sound of the engine. The horn blasted. Tires screamed against wet pavement. The SUV swerved, missing me by what felt like inches, close enough that the side mirror nearly clipped my elbow. It fishtailed, corrected, and kept going. The brake lights flared once, as if the driver was considering stopping, then dimmed as the SUV accelerated away into the dark.
I stood in the middle of the road. Rain hammering down. Chest heaving. My right hand pressed against my hip, blood running over my fingers and down my wrist and dripping onto the asphalt where it was immediately diluted by the rain.
I lifted the hem of my hoodie.
The bite was ugly. A crescent of puncture wounds, deep and ragged, the skin around them already swelling, the flesh beneath visible in a way that flesh should never be visible. I could see the individual tooth marks, could count them if I wanted to, and each one was leaking blood at its own rate, some fast, some slow, the wound weeping steadily in the rain. I'd seen my mother come home from shifts with her scrubs stained from wounds like this. I knew what she'd say. That it needed cleaning, irrigation, probably a course of antibiotics for infection. That animal bites carried bacteria that human immune systems weren't equipped to fight. That the deeper the puncture, the higher the risk.
She'd say all of that, and then she'd ask me what bit me, and I'd have to look her in the eye and say "a wolf," and she'd say "there are no wolves in California," and after that the conversation would go somewhere that I couldn't follow it.
A howl rose from the woods behind me. Long, sustained, resonating across the wet hills. It carried distance and intention, and it wasn't the sound of an animal calling to a pack. It was the sound of something announcing what it had done. A declaration. A claim.
I listened to it fade. The rain fell. The watch on my wrist glowed green, steady now, fully recovered, ready for whatever came next, even though I was not ready for anything at all.
I turned my back to the woods and started the long walk home.
~
Forty minutes. That's how long the walk took. I know because I counted the minutes on my phone to keep myself from counting anything else, from replaying the sound of teeth sinking into muscle, from feeling the phantom weight of the creature on my chest, from seeing those red eyes every time I blinked.
The streets were empty. Of course they were. It was past one in the morning on a Sunday night in Beacon Hills, and everyone with a functioning sense of self-preservation was asleep. I walked down the center of the road because the sidewalks felt too close to the tree lines and the tree lines felt too close to whatever might still be watching from the dark, and every car that passed, all two of them, made me flinch so hard that the pain in my hip doubled.
I tried to think. Couldn't. Every time I reached for a coherent thought, my brain served up an image instead. The green light in the crater. My hands made of fire. The dead woman's face. The red eyes. The feeling of something entering me through the wound, settling into my blood like a tenant who'd found the key under the mat.
By the time I turned onto my street, the bleeding had slowed. My jeans were stiff on the right side, the denim cold and heavy with blood and rainwater, and every step produced a faint squelching sound from the blood that had pooled in my shoe. The watch glowed on my wrist with what I was starting to recognize as its resting state: a soft, steady green, the hourglass symbol pulsing in a rhythm so slow it was almost imperceptible.
Mom's car wasn't in the driveway. Still at the hospital. I had never been so grateful and so terrified to be alone at the same time.
I locked the front door. Deadbolted it. Checked the back door. Checked the kitchen windows. Went back and checked the front door again, pressing my palm flat against it as if I could reinforce it through willpower. The motions were absurd. Whatever had bitten me had been the size of a small horse and strong enough to pin me to the ground with its forelimbs. A locked door meant nothing to it. But rituals exist because they give the illusion of agency, and the illusion of agency was the only thing keeping me vertical.
In the bathroom, I turned on the overhead light and locked that door too.
I stripped. The hoodie came off first, the blood on the right side already oxidizing to a rust-brown that looked like a bad dye job. The t-shirt underneath was worse, soaked through, the fabric sticking to the wound in a way that made peeling it off a process that I had to do in stages, each tug separating dried blood from raw skin and sending a fresh wave of nausea rolling through my stomach. I dropped both in the bathtub. The jeans followed. All three garments lay in a heap, rust and brown and dark red, and I stood in my boxers under the fluorescent light and looked at what the night had done to me.
The bite was open and angry. The puncture wounds were deep enough that I couldn't see the bottom of the worst ones, the surrounding tissue swollen and inflamed, the skin around them flushed a deep, livid pink. Blood was still seeping, not flowing, from the deepest marks. I'd grown up with a nurse for a mother. I'd sat in the ER waiting room after her shifts enough times to absorb a working knowledge of wound assessment, and what I was looking at was a wound that needed professional attention. Irrigation. Debridement. Probably stitches for the deepest punctures. Definitely antibiotics.
What I had was hydrogen peroxide, a roll of gauze, and medical tape.
I poured the peroxide over the wound. The contact was immediate and chemical, a fizzing burn that made my vision swim and forced me to grip the edge of the sink with both hands, my knuckles white, my teeth clenched around a sound that I couldn't let myself make because making it would mean acknowledging the full scope of what was happening, and I was not ready for that. The peroxide foamed white in the puncture marks, bubbling up and over the torn edges of skin, and I watched it work and told myself that this was enough. That it would be fine. That people survived animal bites every day with less than this.
I patted the wound dry with a clean towel. Layered gauze over it, three pads thick, pressing them down with my fingers until I was sure they covered everything. Then the tape, strips of it, crossing the gauze in a grid pattern the way I'd seen Mom do a hundred times. The tape pulled at the skin around the edges of the wound in a way that promised it would hurt worse coming off, but at least the bleeding was hidden now. Contained. Out of sight, which was almost the same as under control.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Scratches on my arms from branches. A bruise forming on my right cheekbone where a branch or a hoof had caught me during the stampede. Mud in my hair, under my fingernails, in the creases of my ears. Dark circles under my eyes that belonged to someone who'd been awake for twenty hours, not the four that had passed since Stiles showed up on my porch.
And the watch.
It sat on my left wrist, glowing softly, looking almost innocent under the bathroom light. The hourglass symbol pulsed with the steady rhythm of a sleeping heartbeat. The casing was smooth, clean, untouched by the mud and the blood and the rain that covered the rest of me. I turned my wrist over and studied the underside. No seam. No clasp. No mechanism for removal. The band, if you could call it that, was continuous, seamless, fused to my skin in a way that made the boundary between device and body difficult to identify. I pressed a fingernail into the gap between the casing and my wrist. There was no gap.
I pulled. Gently. Then less gently. Then with enough force that I was bracing my right foot against the base of the sink for leverage. Nothing. The thing might as well have been a part of my skeleton. It wasn't going anywhere, and it didn't care how I felt about that.
I let go. Stared at it. It stared back.
Two things had been done to me tonight without my consent. Something had attached itself to my arm and rewritten my body into a creature made of fire. And something had held me down in the mud and put its teeth through my hip and pushed something into my blood that I could still feel, a low warmth in my veins that wasn't fever and wasn't adrenaline and wasn't anything I had a word for.
I didn't know what either of them meant. I didn't know if they were connected. The watch had come from the sky. The creature had come from the woods. One was mechanical and green and precise. The other was biological and red and brutal. They didn't seem related. But they had happened on the same night, in the same forest, to the same person, and the coincidence sat in my chest like a stone that was too heavy to carry and too important to put down.
I turned the shower on. Let the water get hot. Stepped in carefully, angling my right hip away from the spray, and stood under the stream with my eyes closed. The heat was good. The sound was better. Running water over tile, simple and domestic, a sound that belonged in a bathroom and not in a nightmare. I stood there until the shaking stopped. Until my hands were steady and my breathing was even and my heart was beating at something close to its normal rate.
Then I turned off the water, dried myself, taped a fresh layer of gauze over the bandage where the shower had loosened the edges, put on clean boxers and a t-shirt, and walked into my bedroom.
The lacrosse stick was on the bed. The alarm clock read 2:34 AM. The posters were on the walls. The textbooks were stacked on the desk. My room was exactly the way I'd left it, preserved in the amber of a life that had ended four hours ago without my permission.
I picked up my phone. Stiles' name was at the top of my recent calls. My thumb hovered over it.
I could call him. He'd answer. Stiles always answered, even at 2:34 AM, even if he had to peel his face off the keyboard where he'd fallen asleep researching whatever topic had consumed him that week. I could tell him everything. The crater. The watch. The fire. The creature. The bite. He'd believe me or he wouldn't, but he'd come over, and having someone else in the room would make the silence easier to bear.
But telling Stiles would make it real. Right now, in this room, in this quiet, it was still possible to treat the night as something that had happened to me, a series of terrible events that I had survived and could file away and never think about again. The moment I said the words out loud, the moment someone else knew, it would stop being something that happened and start being something that was happening. A present tense event with a future I couldn't see. And I was not ready for that. I was not ready for this to be real.
I put the phone down.
I lay on the bed. The comforter was cold against my skin. The bite throbbed in time with my heartbeat, each pulse sending a dull wave of pain radiating from my hip down my leg and up into my ribs. I could feel the gauze shifting against the wound with every breath. I could feel the watch on my wrist, a constant, subtle weight, like a hand resting on my arm that never lifted.
I stared at the ceiling. The green glow of the hourglass cast a faint emerald wash across the plaster, and it moved when I moved, shifted when I shifted, tracking me like an eye that never closed.
Somewhere outside, distant enough to be safe and close enough to be a reminder, a wolf howled. The sound entered my room through the open window and settled on my chest like a second weight, and the wound on my hip pulsed once, deep, in a rhythm that did not match my heartbeat but answered the howl like a call returned.
I lay still. I breathed. I did not close my eyes, because every time I did, I saw red.
Eventually, the exhaustion was heavier than the fear, and I slept. But even in sleep, I could feel it. The warmth in my blood. The weight on my wrist. Two things I hadn't asked for, living inside me now, sharing the space where I used to be the only tenant.
And outside the window, the moon hung full and white and patient over Beacon Hills, and it did not care what I was becoming.
Yes i know there isnt alot of dialogue but that will change go to my patreon if you want to see advanced chapters