Just so you guys know the first 13 chapters are gonna be short but after that the chapter lengths are going to be 5-7k words and more if necessary or if i want to but with that being said heres my patreon of 13+ chapters if you like my work and want to support me -
The last thing I remember is the headlights.
Not the music on the radio, not the rain hammering against the windshield, not even the sound of my own breathing. Just the headlights. Two white circles cutting through the dark like the eyes of something that had already decided I was dead.
I was twenty-three. Drove a black Civic that I'd paid off six months early because that's the kind of person I was. Disciplined. Focused. The type of guy who woke up at five in the morning to train before work, who mapped out his meals on Sunday nights, who treated every sparring session like it was a title fight. I wasn't rich. Wasn't famous. But I had a plan. Always had a plan.
The plan didn't account for a drunk driver running a red light at fifty miles per hour.
I didn't feel the impact. That's what nobody tells you about dying. You'd think it would hurt. You'd think there'd be some moment of clarity, some flash of your life playing out like a movie reel. But there's nothing. One second I existed. The next, I was staring into a void so black and so absolute that the word "darkness" doesn't even begin to cover it.
No tunnel. No light. No dead relatives waiting for me on the other side.
Just nothing.
And then, just as quickly as I'd been swallowed by it, the nothing spat me back out.
I woke up gasping. Not the kind of gasp you do when you surface from a pool. The kind where your lungs are screaming because they haven't been used in what feels like years, and every nerve in your body fires at once like someone just plugged you into a wall socket. My hands shot out and grabbed whatever was closest to me, which turned out to be bedsheets. Thin, cheap ones that smelled like fabric softener and dust.
I was in a bed. A small one. In a room I didn't recognize.
The ceiling was white with a crack running diagonally from the corner near the window to the light fixture in the center. There was a desk against the far wall with a closed laptop on it. A backpack hanging from the door handle. Posters on the wall, one of some MMA fighter I vaguely recognized and another of a basketball player mid-dunk.
My breathing was ragged. My hands were shaking. I looked down at them and froze.
They weren't my hands.
I mean, they were hands. Attached to my wrists, responding to my brain's commands. But they were smaller than the ones I remembered. Younger. The calluses I'd built up over years of grappling and bag work were gone. The small scar on my left knuckle from a fight I got into when I was nineteen was gone. These were the hands of someone who hadn't lived the life I'd lived.
I threw the sheets off and stumbled to the bathroom. There was a mirror above the sink, and when I looked into it, the face staring back at me wasn't mine.
It was younger. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Brown skin, sharper jawline than I'd had at that age, dark eyes that looked almost black in the dim bathroom light. The kid was lean but not built. Athletic frame, like he played a sport but didn't take the weight room seriously yet. Short dark hair, slightly uneven like he'd cut it himself.
I gripped the edges of the sink so hard my knuckles went pale.
"What the hell," I whispered. The voice that came out wasn't mine either. Younger. A little deeper than you'd expect for the face, but not by much.
I stood there for a long time. I don't know how long. Minutes. Maybe longer. My mind was doing what it always did under pressure. Compartmentalizing. Sorting. I was a fighter. Had been since I was fourteen and walked into my first wrestling gym because the alternative was getting my ass kicked by kids bigger than me in a neighborhood that didn't care about fairness. Fighters don't panic. They assess. They adapt.
So I assessed.
I was alive. That was the first fact. Whatever had happened to me, I was breathing, my heart was beating, and my brain was functioning. That was more than I could say five minutes ago, or however long ago the accident was.
I was in someone else's body. That was the second fact. Harder to accept, but undeniable. The evidence was right there in the mirror.
I went back to the bedroom and started looking for information. The backpack had a school binder in it with the name "Zane McCall" written on the inside cover in messy handwriting. There was a phone on the nightstand, locked, but the lock screen showed a notification from someone saved as "Mom" that read: "Dinner's at 7. Your father's working late again."
McCall.
I knew that name.
I sat on the edge of the bed and let the weight of it settle over me. McCall. As in Scott McCall. As in Teen Wolf. I'd watched the show years ago, back when I was in high school myself. Wasn't obsessed with it or anything, but I'd seen enough to remember the broad strokes. Werewolves. Hunters. A town called Beacon Hills where everything went sideways. Scott was the main character. Good kid. Got bitten by an Alpha. Spent six seasons trying not to die.
I scrolled through the phone. The lock code was easy enough to guess, the kid's birthday, which I found on a school ID card tucked into his wallet on the desk. The texts told me everything I needed to know. Zane McCall. Sixteen years old. Son of Alex and Sarah McCall. Sarah was Melissa McCall's younger sister, which made Scott my cousin. They lived in Sacramento, about two hours from Beacon Hills. Zane and Scott weren't close. A handful of texts between them over the past year, mostly surface-level stuff. Birthday wishes. A random meme or two. The kind of relationship where you knew someone existed but didn't really know them.
Alex McCall was a contractor. Long hours. The texts between Zane and his father were short and transactional. "Be home by 6." "Left money on the counter." "Don't forget to lock up." Sarah's messages were warmer but busy. She was a nurse, same as her sister Melissa. Night shifts, double shifts, the kind of schedule that meant she loved her kid but wasn't around enough to prove it.
I didn't remember Scott having a cousin in the show. Which meant either this body was someone who existed in the background and never mattered enough to be mentioned, or the universe had made room for me specifically. Either way, the implications were the same. I was in a world where werewolves were real, where Hunters carried crossbows and wolfsbane, where people died on a regular basis in ways that would make the six o'clock news anywhere else but somehow got swept under the rug in Beacon Hills.
I needed to think. I needed to plan.
But before I could do either, something on my left wrist caught my attention.
I looked down. There, clamped around my wrist like it had always been there, was a device. It was bulky, circular, with a dark face plate that had a green hourglass symbol in the center. The band was grey and black, seamless, like it had been fused to my skin rather than strapped on.
My heart rate spiked. Because I recognized it.
Not from Teen Wolf. From something else entirely. Something I'd watched as a kid, long before werewolves and supernatural dramas entered my radar.
The Omnitrix.
I pressed my fingers against the face plate, and it pulsed with a faint green light in response to my touch. Warm. Almost alive.
I sat there in a dead kid's bedroom, in a dead kid's body, staring at a device that shouldn't exist, in a world that shouldn't be real.
And for the first time since I woke up, I smiled.
Because if this was real, then I wasn't just some kid who got dropped into a nightmare.
I was the most dangerous thing in it.