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In Stiles’ defense — well, all right, two things.
Thing number one: who ever heard of a serial killer in a town the size of Beacon Hills, anyway? Even a two- or three-victim killing spree would basically cut the population in half. They don’t tend to get a lot of violent crime, or when they do it’s not — it’s not like this. Occasional drunken assault, sure. Every once in a while, manslaughter, murder, who knows. But honestly, this whole serial killer thing is so far beyond the pale, as far as pretty much everyone’s concerned, that half of the town is scared absolutely shitless and barely leaving their houses and the other half doesn’t seem one hundred percent sure that this isn’t all some kind of very elaborate and very sick prank, or a mass hallucination, or...
Fine, so, there’s that, right: the idea that serial killers just don’t do places like Beacon Hills, at least not as more than one single stop in a longer trail of bodies. Stiles knows enough about crime, more than enough, to know that that’s actually bullshit, even if there wasn’t a steady stream of proof coming into the morgue every couple weeks, but even he’s found himself a little swept up in the disbelief, and honestly, he thinks that’s fair. But then, thing two is, he’s always been the kid balanced right on the edge of too smart for his own good and too stupid to walk without running into walls: good grades, except when he gets so distracted by his own little completely un-school-related research projects to bother with things like homework and studying, and a fast talker, and an eye for puzzles.
Thing two is, he's always known he was smart enough to have a go at being the one to solve the mystery, crack the case, track down the bad guy — he's sure as hell snuck into his dad's office to pore over case files often enough, not to mention the hours and hours up to his elbows in the evidence compiled by like-minded internet strangers on cold cases from all over the country — but he's never in his fucking life thought he'd be smart enough to actually, you know, succeed.
He's not sure quite yet if he's glad to have proven himself wrong.
He's pretty sure — okay, kind of sure — okay, he hopes to hell and back that the guy, the killer — the way his gut flutters at the thought probably would have freaked him out a couple years ago, but he's so far beyond that now that it's not even fucking funny — hasn't noticed him yet. True, he's kind of distracted at the moment, but he also wouldn't have made it this far if he was distracted enough in the heat of the moment to not at all notice a graceless, mouthbreathing eighteen-year-old hiding just around the corner while he stuffs a woman's chest cavity full of dainty blue flowers.
The wolfsbane had been the first clue the cops — his dad and the rest of Beacon Hills PD, and then the FBI when they got called in, and probably fucking Buffy and Mulder and Scully and that guy from Fringe at this point, because no one else seems to be doing any good — had really focused in on, like they thought they were gonna drive through town and find a house that had it growing in the windows and break down the door yelling “Aha!” Stiles is sure it means something, of course, but he doesn't even pretend to know what, though he had dutifully chased that lead down to its inevitable dead end just like everyone else, just to be sure. More than likely it's something personal, a code he couldn't hope to crack without the key, or at least that's his going theory.
The pattern — the victim type — is another obvious potential avenue which was very tempting back in the early days, when nobody had any idea yet what the hell was going on; there was always the chance that that would be something, too, that they would figure out who or what the archetype was that all the vics were fulfilling and that would lead to some breakthrough, whether it was something as specific as “killing a bunch of people who look like an ex-girlfriend” or just a tamer grasp at motive without any real potential to identify the killer, like a good old-fashioned “goes after hookers” or something. And this had definitely looked like that at first, but like the wolfsbane, the lead had quickly fizzled out, at least in terms of anything really useful — or that as what the feds thought, anyway, when they dropped it any moved on. But Stiles — Stiles peers out from his not-so-well-guarded hiding place, and watches the way the latest victim’s blood gleams in the moonlight, and bites his lip against a flare of victorious smugness. Stiles fucking knows better.
This latest woman — he doesn’t recognize her, which he’s together enough now to realize is probably a good thing in terms of his current mental state, because no matter what there’s a difference between watching a man shove flowers into the corpse of a stranger and watching him do it to someone you know — definitely fits the bill, though things are gonna have to start diversifying a little bit before too long if this show is gonna stay in Beacon Hills. Still, for now: white, or at least white-passing, dark hair, more-or-less athletic build, not too old but not too young. This one, in particular, is probably mid-thirties; the youngest so far was 17, formerly one of Stiles’ classmates. Or… formerly one of Stiles’ former classmates, anyway. Graduation was two weeks ago, and there had been a memorial.
There’s no apparent gender or lifestyle component, no common thread like a physical location or group affiliation — nothing beyond appearance and apparent convenience; it isn’t like anyone has been snatched from their houses, at least not yet. No break-ins, or anything as complicated and likely to leave evidence as that — just wholesale abductions, people there one minute and gone the next because they decided, even in the atmosphere of tension and terror, that surely it was fine if they stepped out by themselves, even if it was at night, even if there was no one around. Stiles can understand it, really, he can — he’s a fucking teenage boy, he is very familiar with the comforting draw of but it won’t happen to me.
Except it had happened to them. Over a dozen now, here one minute and gone the next, right up until they turned back up with their wrists cut and their chests spilling blue-purple flowers. Wrong place, wrong time.
Not fifty feet away, Mr. Wrong Place, Wrong Time himself is still working, with his back to Stiles. He’s completely silent: no creepy humming, no talking to the body, nothing that could theoretically give anything about him away. Stiles has no idea if he’s like this all the time, or if he knows he has an audience and just hasn’t acknowledged it yet; he can’t decide which thrills and horrifies him more.
For what it’s worth, he — the killer — more or less fits the profile that law enforcement has cobbled together for him: male, just under forty, muscular enough to theoretically overpower anyone who isn’t a professional, especially if they’re not expecting him. Stiles hasn’t seen his face yet, but then he doesn’t need to; he knows already, without a doubt, exactly who he’ll find. God, it’s really something; the cops are so close to the full picture, to everything they’d need to at least I.D. him, if not actually flush him out. So fucking close, which explains, after all, why Stiles was able to do it with just the tiniest bit of extra help. The killer’s identity is almost obvious, really, at least in hindsight, except — well.
The thing is, his alibi is literally too perfect. It’s not — Stiles is more than familiar with the concept of the fair and unfair mystery, the one you can solve if you’re paying attention versus the one where some key information has been withheld, where you can’t do anything no matter how smart or good a cop or how able to get inside the killer’s head you are, and this one? This mystery is 100% USDA-certified grass-fed Grade A not fucking fair, so much so that — well, saying he feels sorry for his dad and every other poor fuckin’ sap who tried to solve it sounds super arrogant, but he does, and he’s fully aware that the only reason his own position is any more advantageous is pure dumb luck. Because there is most definitely a piece of information missing, a little tidbit misplaced that slots fucking everything together so incredibly neatly, and he stumbled onto it completely by accident, because he’s stupid enough to wander through the woods alone at night like he wants to get added to the damn body count.
(Which, he doesn’t. Probably. That’s not what the twisting in his gut is about, he’s… mostly sure.)
This is only the second time Stiles has seen him, but already he knows enough to know that he’s stumbled onto something even bigger than a small-town serial killer. He hasn’t quite figured out the details of exactly what yet, but at least he’s done what no one else has managed: he’s got a positive I.D. He found the last clue, the missing piece, and suddenly the case was solvable — suddenly here he is, once again in the middle of the woods where he shouldn’t be, watching as the killer starts to wrap up his work. Watching, and not quite gloating, but proud all the same, because this is it. This, whether or not he can ever tell anyone else about it, is his moment of triumph. He’s some dumb kid barely out of high school, and he’s the one who has dreamed the impossible dream or what-the-fuck-ever and solved the case that’s had his dad and every other cop in Beacon Hills and the whole state and half the country and the fucking FBI on tenterhooks for months.
Really, it was easy enough to put together once he’d realized that being dead wasn’t as good an alibi for Peter Hale as everyone else seems to think.
—
The killer had already racked up a lot of names by the time Stiles went into the woods the first time.
The Beacon Hills Butcher was one of the first ones to pop up. It didn’t stick for several reasons, among them the fact that it was bland and cliché and also the fact that butchering wasn’t really an accurate description. The kills are much cleaner than that; sure, everyone’s chest is open and emptied and stuffed with flowers, but it almost doesn’t look like mutilation so much as art, the whole thing done very neatly and the bodies always pristine by the time anyone discovered them, wiped completely clean of blood. Exsanguination helped with the pristine condition of their pale, bluish skin, but also lead to a second, even shittier nickname: the Vampire. That one got tossed around a little longer, at least by Stiles’ classmates, though he kind of suspects that that was due to some very misguided paranormal romance factor.
Of course, the obvious answer was staring them in the face very nearly all along.
The Wolfsbane Murders — perpetrated by the Wolfsbane Killer, of course — have completely consumed Beacon Hills and the surrounding area; the rest of the state, and the rest of the country, watches in horror, but not the same kind of terror. The victims are from a very specific geographical area, and the killer shows no signs of roaming. Stiles had admitted to being from Beacon Hills to some of his online friends, on a true crime forum he’s frequented or years, a few months into the whole thing, and while some people thought he was bluffing or lying to get attention, those he’s known for longer — the ones he really thinks of as friends — had seemed to vacillate between horrified and fascinated, which, honestly, Stiles finds very, very relatable.
So: last in the string of very mediocre names, the Wolfsbane Killer at least has the benefit of being accurate, even if it’s harping on something that Stiles was sure — well, mostly sure, as sure as you can be with something like this — was more an aesthetic or thematic choice than an actual clue by, like, the third kill. It’s just so obvious, and everything else about the murders was — is — so smart, so… professional. No way a guy who leaves so little in the way of kill sites, of motive, of any form of evidence whatsoever — no way a guy who’s that good just fucking leaves some obvious shit all over the victims, or all up in them, more accurately. Maybe that kind of assumption isn’t 100% safe to make — even genius killers fuck up — but, Stiles figured at the time, if he didn’t start making some assumptions and drawing some conclusions, he was just going to end up paralyzed with the sheer multitude of questions involved in this fucking case.
But obvious evidence or not, and no matter how much Stiles sides with ‘not,’ even still he’d had to admit that it wasn’t nothing. And, okay, maybe some part of him had thought maybe the cops just weren’t looking at it from the right angle. Maybe they weren’t going to find it growing in someone’s backyard and walk away with a psycho in cuffs, but wolfsbane grows plenty of other places. Like, for example, the ground. Outside. In nature.
Like the Preserve.
And nobody had found any sign of a kill site, but it’s not like they’d searched every inch of the fucking woods, right? And, to be clear, Stiles wasn’t planning on doing that either. But if the wolfsbane was something, then it might be just as much as he needed to point him to the right stretch of dirt. Flowers are — decently visible, right? He might be able to spot them from a distance. Enough of a distance to prevent him from having to walk the entire goddamn Preserve, anyway.
Plus, there was something even on top of that — even stupider, kind of, at least as far as he’d known, or thought he’d known, at that point. There was the old Hale house, a black husk that only hosted the occasional gang of rowdy ghost-hunting teens these days, seeing as of its former occupants, everyone was either burned to death almost a decade ago, or living in a loft in town, soon to take off for safer pastures, if their name was Derek, or — or they were the very first kill, the very first person to turn up stuffed full of wolfsbane, if their name was Laura.
After Derek had been cleared of suspicion in the death of his sister — he was literally on shift at the station at the time, in a meeting with several of the other deputies, so, you know, he was pretty easy to cross of the list — and the investigators had been unable to turn up anyone in particular who might have wanted to kill Laura Hale and a series of Hale look-alikes — no known Montague-Capulet style blood feuds, et cetera — the going theory had been that Laura had been the one to set the pattern, not the first person who fit the pattern. Or, in other words, she’d been fucking unlucky, whether she pissed someone off at random or was just the victim of chance or what, and then everyone after that had been fucking unlucky to look like her. Of course, Stiles personally scoffed at that from the very first time he heard it, given the age range and mix of sexes among the vics — the second had been a thirty-year-old dude, and the third a girl who only vaguely resembled Laura, five years younger and heavily tattooed — but he also hadn’t really had a good alternative yet. He sure as hell didn’t know who’d have such a vendetta against a family already almost wiped out by tragedy that they’d start offing every person in Beacon Hills who even kind of looked like them.
But that was still more than enough to back up his idea to go into the woods; between that and the wolfsbane, he’d been half-sure, half-praying he’d at least find something.
It had been a cold night — slightly unseasonably cold for early October, but only slightly — and foggy as all hell. Stiles didn’t bother being super quiet, at least not at first; everything he’d been taught about wilderness safety as a kid said it was actually good to make noise, so you don’t accidentally startle something with fangs and claws, and he wasn’t exactly worried about getting caught, because who the hell was going to be out in the woods at that time of night to do the catching?
Except the killer, a voice that sounded like the last shreds of his common sense pointed out, but if Stiles had been in the business of listening to his common sense at any point in his life, ever, he certainly wasn’t at that moment.
The woods themselves — the body of the Preserve — were a dead end, or at least he hadn’t been able to find what he was looking for. He spotted clumps of wolfsbane a couple times, but never enough to fill a Ziploc baggie, let alone an emptied and cleaned human chest cavity. He searched around the flowers every time he found them anyway, in case the clusters of blooms were marking something even if they weren’t the source of the petals found in and around the victims, but no dice. If there had ever been anything to find, it was long since gone; blood, after all, would soak into the ground, and everything else could have been gathered up and disposed of. So he couldn’t discount the kill sites being somewhere in the Preserve, but he sure couldn’t prove it, either.
The heart of the Preserve, though. The Hale house. At the time, he couldn’t have credited his decision to go there as he’d initially planned, despite his mounting frustration and sore feet and the urge to just give up and go the fuck home after a night of nothing on top of nothing, to any particular motive — not instinct or intuition or even plain old whim. All he knew was, tired and grumpy as he was, he still felt like he should check it out, cover all his bases, the way he’d originally intended to. He wouldn’t find anything, he knew that; the cops might not have had the manpower to search the entire goddamn Preserve top to bottom, but the Hale house was certainly an obvious enough place of interest that they’d gone over it with a fine-toothed comb at least twice, to Stiles’ knowledge. So — the odds he’d find something when no one else had yet were nonexistent, especially on a foggy, windy night when he was already exhausted, but he went. He went anyway.
He was just barely starting to pick out any detail of the house beyond just the hulking, skeletal outline in the fog when he realized that someone was already there.
This time, Stiles definitely could identify what lead him to act; the fear was so strong that he practically felt his heart crack his ribs as he dove behind a tree. No reason to assume the person standing in the shadow of the Hale house under the waxing moon was the killer. There were approximately a million other possible explanations, probably, except he couldn’t think of a single fucking one of them, and anyway, the terror and exhilaration fighting for real estate in his chest and pinning down his breath between them were pure animal instincts. He doesn’t think they’d have given a shit even if he could have come up with some sort of logical alternative explanation to counter oh god I’m in the woods at two AM alone with a serial killer.
He had a hand clapped over his mouth, trying to stifle his breathing, and the wind — he could hardly hear anything over the tattoo of his pulse, but the wind was strong, blowing towards him, the leaves rustling. And the fog, the fog was thick, and the figure was facing the house, he was pretty sure; maybe he hadn’t been seen, or heard, maybe he wasn’t…
After a minute or so of sheer panic, it was like his nervous system admitted defeat; he was shaking, the initial burst of adrenaline fading, and desperately choking back sobs in his attempt to stay silent, but the wheels of his mind slowly began to unfreeze, something approximating thought returning as he gradually started to believe that he hadn’t been seen, hadn’t been heard. There were no footsteps crunching toward him through the leaf litter, no one calling him out, no sign at all that he hadn’t imagined seeing anything in the first place.
Stiles had squeezed his eyes shut. He should take this for the fucking incredible burst of luck that it was and get the hell out of Dodge, sneak away while he could and then run like a bat out of hell once he got a safe distance away, he told himself. Knowing who the killer was wouldn’t do him any goddamn good if he himself ended up on the chopping block; he should never have come here at all, and he should certainly get the fuck out while he had the chance, that last lingering gasp of good sense begged the rest of him.
Slowly, carefully, he moved until he could peer around the edge of his hiding spot, looking toward the house.
As far as he could tell, the… whoever it was hadn’t moved at all; they were just standing there, completely still, evidently staring up at the house. Stiles couldn’t see their face; not with the fog, and not with them facing away, though he was fully aware that that was also possibly the only thing keeping him alive. It looked like a man, maybe, but it was hard to tell even that from this distance — broad-shouldered, whoever they were, and maybe slightly taller than average, using the house for scale. Stiles desperately tried to catalogue anything he could get, anything that might mean anything — assuming this was the killer at all, and not just some rando in the woods; Stiles himself was, after all, a rando in the woods at present, he couldn’t really talk, could he?
But it was just — it was just too… something about it stuck in his mind, in his throat, the way the figure was standing completely still, not moving or speaking or doing anything at all except staring at the house. It was just — it was too fucking weird. Stiles watched, from the relative and incredibly slight safety of his hiding place, and he knew with perfect certainty that whatever this was he’d stumbled onto, it was something out of the ordinary.
And then there was movement, and he ducked instantly behind the tree again, holding his breath and only daring to peek out again after a good thirty seconds. The person was moving — definitely a man, walking — not directly towards Stiles, thank god, but walking sort of at an angle, away from the house, and the important part, the relevant part, was that Stiles could see his face now, getting just enough closer that he could actually pick out some level of detail. He wished, almost absently, that he had a camera with him — something a little better than his shitty phone camera, anyway. A telephoto lens would be nice. Hell, he’d take a sketchbook at the moment, though an artist he was not. For want of any or all of those things, he squinted through the fog at the man and tried his damndest to memorize his face. He was a stranger, no one Stiles recognized, though something about him tugged at Stiles’ gut — just the slightest bit of familiarity, but there would be time to wonder about that later, when he was (god willing) safe at home and not actually within a hundred feet of the guy. Dark hair, light eyes, handsome face but not too handsome, just enough to put you at ease — Jesus, the guy was Ted Bundy all over again, but that was fine. None of that 70s hair, at least.
Stiles acknowledged that his train of thought was running even more haywire than normal, owing to the threat of eminently being serial murdered, and then firmly put that aside. Time to think about the guy's goddamn hair later. Time now to — to stay very still and try very hard not to be seen. And, maybe, to try very hard to figure out where he'd seen him before, too, because that seemed pretty critical — that was, after all, kind of the whole point, the whole reason he was out here. He shifted, as quietly as possible, so keep the bulk of the tree trunk between himself and the killer, and it was that motion, bringing his face into view in profile rather than at just the hint of an angle, that brought everything clicking into place in Stiles' head.
That face — that face, and that exact angle, he'd seen it before. Except the image superimposed over it in his mind was scarred, burned horribly, twisted out of shape, and Stiles had no idea how those kinds of injuries could ever have been repaired, but then, he didn't know how Peter Hale could have returned from the grave, either.
He brought a shaking hand to his mouth, desperate to quiet the sound of his ragged breathing, to quiet the way his pulse was pounding loudly enough in his ears to drown out any hint of sound from the forest all around. He would have been such easy prey in that moment, but — maybe balancing the scales to make up for every single miserable thing that's ever happened to him — the killer didn't turn around, didn't appear to hear him heaving for breath behind that fucking tree, didn't gut him and drain him and stuff him black up with delicate blue flowers.
He just left.
And Stiles, mind racing, stayed right there, frozen, for hours yet. He did, eventually, sink to the ground, but, he didn't move at all other than that as the night wore on around him. It was probably the longest he'd ever been still since before he learned to fucking crawl — possibly ever. Part of it was the fear, the sheer, animal terror of knowing he'd had a brush with a predator that could end him as easily as breathing, and it was really only sheer luck that had kept him safe. But part of it was his racing mind, finally given enough to tinker with that it overrode every fidget and nervous tic.
Peter Hale was the Wolfsbane Killer. He'd killed his niece — Stiles once would've had to guess at the exact relation between Peter and Laura, but what with the relatively obvious connection between the Hales and the killings, he'd ended up memorizing their family tree almost by instinct — and, for some reason, hadn't killed his nephew, and hadn't framed him, either. But even more interesting than that was, of course, the fact that he'd died in the hospital years ago now, and even before that he'd been in a coma, might as well have been dead. How long, Stiles wondered as he leaned back against the tree and shivered, had that been a lie? Had he been laying there planning this in that hospital bed? Had he lifted himself out of the grave? Why? Revenge on whoever started the Hale house fire? But then why the niece? Why the string of people who, from a purely aesthetic perspective, could almost have been his family, too? Why any of it? Why?
That night, he'd been safe, in the end, to sit there and turn over the puzzle in his mind. He'd stayed until dawn broke, until the fog started to dissipate, and only then had he made his way back out of the preserve, hiking until he got to his Jeep and hightailed it the fuck out of there. His dad, it turned out, didn't notice a thing; he'd been at the station all night, and hadn't yet gotten home by the time Stiles slipped in the back door and then double-triple-quadruple checked the locks on every door and window. That night, it had been okay — Stiles had brushed right up against danger but ultimately been completely fine. His rabbity, prey-animal instinct to freeze while his mind worked over the problem hadn't cost him.
This time, it looks like that might work out a little differently.
“Are you going to come over and say hello,” a smooth voice says mildly, jarring him back to the present, and for a moment Stiles can’t even begin to process it, his brain refusing to understand exactly who is speaking and exactly how fucked it makes him, “or am I going to have to come to you?”
Fuck doesn’t even begin to cover it. Stiles mouths it anyway; he can’t actually make a sound, his lungs completely void, his chest frozen. The wheels of his brain spin, but it's completely useless; the one and only thought that's blaring through his brain is RUN, except he's not quite stupid enough to actually try that, and just barely has enough control to avoid giving in to the impulse to do so anyway.
But if he's caught, then he can't hide anymore, and if he can't hide and he can't run, that really leaves only one option.
Stiles takes a deep, steadying breath, hopes his dad won't be the one to find the inevitable scene, and steps into view.
—
There was, of course, a difference between killing a wolf and a man. One was a duel, and one was a hunt — and, too, one had been personal, and one was a ritual. That wasn't to say Peter didn't take any kind of personal satisfaction from the other kills, but Laura had been different on every level. Laura had been his vindication, his solution, his antidote to the flames that still crackled in his chest and just under his skin and the smoke that never seemed to clear from his lungs. Laura had been, at the time of her death, the only one he intended to kill — why would he bother with anyone else? Maybe Derek, he supposed, but even then, the boy had been far younger, and hadn't been Peter's alpha. He could live. Alone, yes, without even the semblance of a pack, which was at least as cruel as death, but he could live. Maybe someday he'd find something to patch over the hole loss had no doubt left in his chest.
Peter, though. Peter had been expecting Laura to be that thing for him, had been expecting her death to entirely absolve him. Had been hoping, though he didn't really recognize it as hope until after the fact — inconvenient, in hindsight, because he might have saved himself some time and trouble if he had.
The real question, after killing Laura, after ripping out her throat and after lovingly tucking wolfsbane into every crevice of her cooling body, was just who he was going to kill next. He re-examined Derek as an option, and, just as he had the first time, discarded him, for all the same reasons as before but with the added angle of not connecting what he now knew would be his kills, plural, with the Hale family writ large. The chance of anyone accurately suspecting him of the killings was vanishingly small, but not impossible, especially not once one factored in hunters on top of 'vanilla' investigators. He hadn't been out long enough yet to really determine if Beacon Hills was now considered off-limits, or if it was mere coincidence that had kept Kate Argent from coming back to finish the job, those years he'd been burning in a hospital bed. A pity, too, that she'd fallen to someone else's claws in her throat many long years before Peter would ever have gotten the chance to kill her himself. But then, he wasn't the only wolf she'd taken everything from, his pack not the only pack she'd destroyed; as disappointing as it had been to read her obituary without being the one to write it himself, he couldn't exactly blame whoever it was that had gotten to taste that particular victory.
Even the mere thought of killing his nephew, though, had been enough to lead him down the mental path to his eventual destination. True, he didn't want to kill Derek himself. Certainly he didn't need to kill him, as he'd needed to kill Laura. But there was something lingering in the shadow of that idea — killing Laura had been more than just the exchange of alpha power, after all, and more too than mere revenge, in a way that he hadn't fully expected until it was already upon him.
He didn't want to kill Derek. But at the same time, the thought of killing some facet of Derek — some element, or, no, some effigy...
The idea needed very little time to take hold of him. Before he had even made his final decision, he'd already identified a suitable target — a young, muscular man, with dark tattoos curling up and down his left arm in a densely-packed sleeve. He wasn't the Derek in Peter's memories, who was preserved forever in amber as a teenager in love with a snake far more venomous than he'd ever see, but something resembling the Derek who still lurked in Beacon Hills, who'd returned after years away only a short time before Peter had made his return, who'd found a job with the police force and kept his head down and attracted as little attention to himself as possible.
Who'd devoted himself to finding his sister's killer, and yet been completely unable to recognize Peter's scent after the years apart, after the way it had changed after the fire. Who didn't even seem to realize he was facing a fellow wolf, which made Peter want to tut and whack him lightly on the back of his head, tell him to look again, look deeper.
It was possible, Peter had reflected as he watched the last of the blood drip from the wrists of the man he'd killed in Derek's place, that it wasn't only for defensibly practical reasons that he'd decided to kill a stand-in rather than his nephew. Perhaps some part of it, too, was lingering affection. Interesting.
Regardless of that, though, the effigy itself had been cathartic. From Derek, he proceeded on through the rest of his nieces and nephews, and from there his various brothers- and sisters-in-law. And then his siblings. His brother first; his sister would be the penultimate kill, and now that he'd cleared out so much of the family tree, he was taking his time, selecting the victims very, very carefully. None of that was out of any fear of law enforcement — they were no closer at all to catching him than they'd been in the beginning, and, indeed, one could even argue that they'd stumbled farther away with time — but out of a desire to really soak in as much of the experience as he possibly could, sucking the marrow from it figuratively as well as, sometimes, quite literally.
It had been easy enough to hide himself in the Preserve; Derek very rarely came anywhere near the woods, and if he was running at all, if he wasn't choking off his wolf as fully as possible, he was doing it on the other side of town, where he wouldn't be able to smell the soot and smoke from the old house. Peter did the opposite, practically bathed himself in the ashes with the moon soaking into his fur and skin and glinting from his teeth, and it served him well. The cops had made a few scans of the woods, but all of the bodies had been found in town. They were far more interested in scoping out abandoned building, especially any with soundproofing. There was, it turned out, an old bank with vaults that would have been almost perfect for such a purpose, if Peter himself hadn't been tied so deeply to the woods.
It was less than a week before he intended to kill Talia — that is, the woman he'd cast in the role of his sister, his second alpha and the second alpha he would kill — that the boy found him.
He was, as it would turn out, the one and only wrinkle in the entire story, but he had the potential to be a pivotal one. It was Peter's hubris that nearly toppled the whole thing, really: the night was cold and thick with fog, and the wind was still to the degree that scents didn't carry as they otherwise might, and on top of all that, he allowed himself to be so caught up in the house, in the fire-smell that lingered in every mote of dust, that by the time the breeze scented just enough that he scented the boy, by the time he caught the sound of rattling, nervous breathing and a rabbit-quick heartbeat, he knew he'd already been seen.
His assessment of the situation was lightning-fast. There was something about the scent that rang some bells, but he was positive he'd never met this specific boy before, didn't know him. Which meant there was a pretty good chance he didn't know Peter, either, but it wouldn't prevent him from giving a description, helping a sketch artist make Peter's life a hell of a lot harder. He had no doubt he could still finish this — there was really only Talia left to go, anyway — but why make it more difficult than he had to?
But he wasn't set up well for a kill out here, and besides, he'd carefully avoided any connection to the Hale house itself. He wasn't going to let lashing out in the heat of the moment against some teenager with rotten luck be the thing that ruined that.
So he let the boy leave. Let him think Peter had left, then watched when he stayed glued in place long afterward, not moving until day started to break. And as he watched, as he waited, as the boy stayed put, Peter felt interest grow, despite himself. Failing to run as soon as the sound of Peter's footsteps faded was an action based out of fear, true, but it wasn't rooted in stupidity — exactly the opposite. Running — bolting — would have made it much, much more likely that Peter caught him, assuming Peter hadn't, in fact, been fully aware of his presence the entire time. Or, at least, very nearly the entire time.
When the boy finally did leave, Peter followed — four-legged the entire time, both as an extra layer of protection against being seen again, more cautious now than he'd been before to the point of mild paranoia, and also for the additional sharpening of his hearing and scent. True, that came at the expense of some visual acuity, but Peter wasn't worried about losing sight of the boy as he tromped back out of the woods on shaking legs. The beautiful plume of fear and sweat coming off him might as well be a physical trail glowing on the ground.
He followed while the boy clambered into a decidedly ramshackle Jeep, and followed while he drove back to Beacon Hills; he wasn't speeding, but he wasn't exactly driving carefully, either. There was a shakiness to the vehicle that Peter knew had more to do with the aftereffects of terror than with adolescent sloppiness. He followed, not directly next to the Jeep but tracking its trajectory, cutting through backyards and ducking down backroads, as the boy passed from the edge of town closest to the Preserve through to one quiet residential street after another, wheels spinning and paws pounding past houses that hadn't yet begun to wake up and meet the growing dawn.
Eventually, the Jeep slowed, rolled to a stop, and shifted into park. And as Peter slowed to a stop, too, he realized he knew this house, knew what the familiar edge to the boy's scent had been.
The Sheriff's cruiser wasn't parked in the driveway this morning, but Peter had seen it there before. Frankly, it was a miracle he hadn't seen the boy himself, or his Jeep, on his previous trips to this particular house, fleshing out and updating his mental map of Beacon Hills with a knowledge of where all of his pursuers laid their heads. Of course, more and more of them were federal agents holed up in hotels, and the local cops were all practically living at the station full-time at this point when they weren't actively participating in investigations or manhunts or patrols, but he'd made a point of locating all of their homes and apartments regardless.
And this house was not just anyone's, but the Sheriff's. And this boy was not just anyone, but the Sheriff's son. Or his nephew or his ward, maybe, but between the scent and a certain family resemblance Peter could see in hindsight, he was inclined to think son.
He crept forward without shifting, a shadow on still on four paws, fitting neatly into the cracks and crevices of the yard. He followed the boy with his eyes, nose, and ears: into the house, then around the house, checking the doors and windows, not missing even one, and then finally up to a second-story bedroom, where he immediately dove for not a cellphone or a computer, but a whiteboard.
Peter had expected him to call from the woods. Then he'd expected him to call in the car. And then he'd expected him to call from the relative safety of his own home, behind safely-locked doors. Of course, locks on doors would do no more to stop Peter than the metal body of a ratty old Jeep or the trunk of a tree, and he'd never have let the call go through. But something — not the same thing that had kept him from killing Derek, but something — told him to wait. Told him to keep waiting, to follow, to watch, but not to strike.
He told himself, coiled like a spring ready to snap in Sheriff Stilinski's backyard, that any moment could be the perfect one to strike, that he was waiting for the opportunity, for the finale. But that thought was bitter with a self-deception that hadn't burdened him in months — in years, even. Certainly not since Laura.
Peter paused, considered, and corrected. He was watching, waiting, because while he had always been a wolf, he was also a man. And, being a man, he was capable of being tempted.
The morning had worn on, and then the afternoon, and then the sun had once again started to set. Through all of it, the Sheriff didn't return home; through all of it, the boy didn't say a word to his father, and — when Peter carefully angled his view through the window to watch his computer screen — he didn't say a word to anyone online, either. He didn't make a phone call, and he didn't send a single text message, and, Peter realized as the evening crept by, he looked — well, it was clear that the experience meant something to him, and it was equally clear that while it had scared him shitless, but... If he was going to start squealing, Peter realized, at first somewhat dubiously and then, slowly, with more and more certainty, that he would have done so already.
If he hadn't been shifted, he would have smiled. As it was, his mouth had fallen open, tongue lolling out over sharp white teeth.
—
Peter doesn't even pause in what he's doing as the boy steps into full view — he's quite close to being done now anyway, and it seems ridiculous to pause or slow down in the home stretch. His eyes, though, track every flicker of motion, his nostrils flaring at the heady bloom of pure terror. The smell of adrenaline is so powerful it would almost bowl Peter over if he weren't expecting it — if, perhaps, he weren't quite so used to the smells human bodies throw off in the moments when they know they're going to die.
That is, after all, certainly what the boy thinks is about to happen. He's visibly trying to put on a brave face, trying to stop himself from shaking and set his jaw with stubborn pride. He is obviously terrified, would be obviously terrified even to someone without a wolf's senses, but, clearly, some part of him knows that showing his belly would only make his situation worse. He knows that if he shows the depth and breadth of his fear, this is going to go very, very badly for him, and he has enough mastery of himself to work to stop that from happening.
There's something cold and rigid as steel at the boy's core, and Peter slowly smiles at the sight of it.
Their eyes meet, and they both freeze entirely for the space of one heartbeat, then two, then five, then ten. Peter's stillness is undeniably that of an apex predator, but the boy — his isn't that, but neither is it the horrified stillness of a deer caught in the glare of an oncoming car, a mouse locking eyes with a cougar. Not quite one, not yet the other.
Peter hums, a short, decisive noise, and then, dusting off his hands — which doesn't do much for the fact that they're covered in blood, naturally, but then he's not really interested in getting clean — steps around the body, narrowing the space between them to what he could cover in just one stride.
"Stiles Stilinski," Peter says, smiling at him in a bland, genial way that visibly sends up a shiver up the boy's spine. "Do I have that right?"
The boy — not yet Peter's boy — Stiles is really too still and stiff already to stiffen further at his own name, but somehow manages anyway. Slowly, so slowly, and not breaking eye contact for even a moment, he nods. This is, as Peter well knows from a few lovely days spent watching him, an unnaturally long time for him to be silent, let alone motionless and silent, and Peter accepts that as the show of respect that it so obviously is.
"It's lovely to meet you properly, Stiles," he says, clasping his hands in front of himself and leaning forward just a little, relishing the way Stiles' heart practically stops every time Peter says his name. "I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to introduce myself before." A pause, just long enough to be sure that Stiles knows exactly what he's saying, catches all the implications — not nearly as long for Stiles as such a pause would necessarily be for some people, as much because Peter's testing him as because he already suspects such a test is unnecessary — and then he adds, "Though I don't think I needed to, did I?"
Another long moment of silence, tension. Then, slowly, so slowly, Stiles shakes his. Peter's smile doesn't move an inch, but approval rumbles in his chest.
"No," he says. "You knew who I was without me telling you, just like I knew who you were without you having to say."
This time, the expectant pause between Peter's words and the desired response isn't nearly as long. Stiles licks his lips, clearly nervous, and his voice shakes noticeably, but he says, "You're Peter Hale."
"And?"
Stiles' eyes dart down to the body. "And the Wolfsbane Killer." A pause. "Obviously."
Peter quirks his lips, more charmed by that than he should be. "Obviously," he echoes. He doesn't repeat the question, doesn't yet let Stiles in on the fact that he only has two pieces of the puzzle; showing him Peter's wolf can come later. There will be, he thinks with no small amount of satisfaction, plenty of time for that, and if there's anything these years since the fire have taught him, it's patience. Instead, he turns, putting his back entirely to Stiles and facing his kill, tracing one finger delicately up her cheek. He'll clean the resulting smear of gore from her face before he leaves her, but it looks right, for now.
"I'm very impressed, you know," Peter says, patting the woman's — Talia's — cheek. Behind him, Stiles doesn't move a muscle, sending another thrum of approval through him. "And you should be proud of yourself. You're the only one who got it right."
Stiles says nothing, but his heartrate, somehow, accelerates yet further. At this rate, it's going to race right out of his chest. Adorable.
"Now, forgive me for stating the obvious, but as much as I am impressed — and I really do mean that, Stiles — I think we can both agree that you've left me with a bit of a problem."
He turns, and finds Stiles once again licking his lips in nervousness. For a split second, Peter pictures the same scene, replicated, but with fresh arterial spray painted over Stiles' chapped lips, and his wolf very nearly overcomes him.
"I'm a loose end," Stiles says. His voice is steadier now than it was before, though he's clearly well aware of the mounting danger to his person. Peter holds eye contact firmly as he nods.
"You may have been the only one to find me," he says, "but I'd have to be a much stupider man to think that that means no one could. That said..." He shrugs artlessly, a smirk quirking his lips for the barest moment. "My dear nephew is leaving town soon, and he's always been the biggest risk. Without him, I'm safer than ever..."
"Except for me," Stiles says, whisper-soft, when Peter prompts him to finish the thought with a raised eyebrow and an expectant look.
The fact that Stiles is completely aware of the implications of what he's saying is painted all over his face, and the fact that he doesn't have any clever ideas to get himself out of this trap in anything other than a body bag is equally clear. He's powerless, as all humans are, and unlike most, he's aware of his own powerlessness, completely aware of what it means to be facing down a far more powerful predator —
And yet.
Peter watches him closely, freezing his own breath in his lungs in order to be absolutely certain he doesn't miss even the most minute implications of expression or auditory cues, and marvels. All that knowledge of his own defenselessness, of the futility of any kind of plan to resist or escape, of the fact that his long, slender neck is all but literally in the jaws of a wolf, and yet his eyes haven't gone flat and lifeless, his baser instincts haven't taken over and sent him spinning off into the woods or collapsing to the ground in a final burst of mortal fear. There's still a spark of something precious in him, something wild and fierce and raw, something Peter so desperately wants to taste.
He's still defiant, at least a little, and that — that is the part Peter finds most fascinating of all. This boy shines brighter than anything in Beacon Hills has in a long, long time; he practically crackles with energy and cunning, and he's right here, practically begging for Peter to take him.
What, exactly, to do with this precious little twist of fate is a puzzle that Peter has been turning over in his head for several days now. Every moment he wasn't contemplating his plan for the woman currently laying in his sister's stead, he was tinkering with his plan for Stiles, which, contrary to what the boy is currently convinced of, is a vastly different sort of thing. Even now, he's teetering back and forth, playing with the final pieces of the puzzle and turning them around until he finds the way to make them all click together neatly, the whole picture falling into place.
The final key is this: since Peter called Stiles out of hiding, Stiles has hardly even glanced at the body. It's not that unlikely for the Sheriff's son — especially one clearly so interested in investigations in his own right — to have seen a dead body before, and with how closely he's been tracking Peter's kills, even the sight of this particular layout of a corpse, flowers and all, certainly can't be unfamiliar to him. But, as Peter is well aware, there's seeing, and then there's knowing. Any normal human, faced with this kind of knowledge, would shy away, driven to nausea, terror, hysterics.
Not Stiles.
And instead — Peter smiles, unable to help himself, and watches Stiles watch him do it, drinking in the way Stiles tracks the change in his expression — instead, Stiles has looked, more than once, at Peter's mouth. At his arms, more than strong enough to kill. At his hands, dripping gore. There had been fear, yes, obviously. But there had been something else, too, that the boy didn't seem at all in control of, and possibly not even aware of. Something far more interesting than simple terror, which, while satisfying in its own way, Peter has had ample exposure to in these past few months.
His smile twists from something human into something that shows all of his teeth, something entirely other. Stiles watches, catalogues, but doesn't flinch, and that last piece of the puzzle slides into place, turning hard and sharp and certain in Peter's chest.
When he speaks, his tone is mild, almost idle. It's completely at odds with the ravenous way he watches Stiles, intent on his reaction. "It might be convenient to have some leverage over the Sheriff, don't you think?"
It's an absolutely transparent excuse; Peter obviously knows that, and, just as obviously, Stiles does, too. The path of his thoughts, no matter how rapid and erratic, is painted all over his face if one looks closely enough, and Peter drinks it in: first of all, why would Peter invite further attention by kidnapping the Sheriff's only son? Why would he suddenly change his MO by keeping a potential victim alive? Where is he going to keep Stiles, and how, and why? It's patently clear that not one bit of it makes any goddamn sense to Stiles — it's clearly an excuse, but, critically, and just as Peter had hoped, the part that it seems Stiles can't immediately divine is what it's an excuse for. His thoughts are so obvious they're practically audible: What is Peter hiding under such an obvious half-truth? What does he gain from any of this?
He'll have to work for those answers, of course; Peter's not going to just give them away. But he has complete confidence that Stiles will get there. It will be interesting to see how, and how soon, but he knows the boy will. And, when he does, Peter will be right there to give him the next set of truths, and the next set of questions. He'll be right there to take that hint of sharpness, that slumbering threat that's so vividly clear under the skin of an unassuming slip of a boy, and pull it out with his teeth. He'll have the honor of being the one to teach Stiles how to use his claws, and he'll be the honor of being the one to teach him to shine in the moonlight.
Peter watches the column of Stiles' throat as he swallows and fights down a smaller, tighter, fiercer smile. Yes, he thinks. This is going to play out exceptionally.