Chapter Text
The next day, Derek woke early, skipped his workout, and pulled on his boots, dark jeans, a faded long-sleeved Henley. The morning was cool, and he was headed up past the foothills, into the deep woods that coated the western side of the Sierras. He tossed some energy bars, water, and his phone into a backpack with a spare shirt and socks. His sunglasses were cold in his hand, colder when a metal leg of the frame brushed against his chest as he slid them into the vee of his shirt on his way out the door.
“Those are hot,” Erica had said, the day after she took the bite, walking in the sunlight through the hospital garden, standing tall and flushed pink as the new flowers on the cherry trees, cautiously giddy with it, almost skipping. “Like, intimidatingly sexy. Like, nobody will talk to you because they can’t handle the fear boner, that kind of sexy.” Her eyes kept flicking to his sunglasses, over his face, and away, like she wanted to stare but wasn’t sure she was allowed.
The day before, her hand had been shaking as she’d set it over his on her soft pale hip, as she’d stopped him, met his red eyes to say, “What’s the catch? If you’re serious. If you’re not just—if you can really—That’s how these things go, right? It’s a trade. There’s a price.” She’d licked her chapped lips, shivered, skin jumping under his touch, heart beating so loud the blood sang to the power itching his teeth. In less than a month, she’d be bold enough to try to steal his sunglasses off his face, and he’d bat her hand away and scowl instead of smiling but she’d laugh, unafraid.
“That’s the idea,” he’d said dryly, the next day in the garden, joking and not-joking. Attraction was another kind of power, as he knew. As he’d learned.
“Is it part of the package?” she’d asked, “Clear skin, muscles, superpowers—” a cure, she couldn’t say, still choked on it with desperate hope “—leather jacket, sunglasses?”
He’d tipped his head forward to make steady eye contact with her over the rims. “It could be,” he’d said. “You’re a brand new you.” He’d winced a little, once his brain caught up and told him where exactly that was from, but nobody knew the stupid musical Laura’s friend had worked for—except Erica had opened her mouth and looked at him out of the corner of her eye and yep, she’d caught it, though she wasn’t quite brave enough yet to ask. But his rueful eyeroll was as much as an admission, and she’d blinked, faced him head-on, and met him with a slow, disbelieving smile.
“Alright,” she’d decided, “I want that. I want that a lot,” and they’d snuck out, gone to the mall, and it had felt like having a sister again. She may have started out more shy than any of the women in his family, but her angry determination, he recognized; her furious drive to grab the world with both hands and shake it until it gave her what she wanted. The next day, they’d stopped at the high school just long enough for her to pick up her homework and sashay through the lunch room, and when she’d bounced back into the passenger seat, she’d been radiant.
The price had come later.
His only stop on the way out of town was the coffee shop, where he got his usual and a few breakfast sandwiches to eat in the car. It wasn’t likely that Stiles would look for him two days in a row, especially since he’d started scheduling his visits, so he took a risk and set out for the far eastern border, where Hale land and the town preserve bled into the expanse of national forest that covered most of the mountains.
He hadn’t been out so far since the Hunger Moon in February, the ground still cold and sleeping under his feet, and he’d only gone once the year before with Isaac, Erica, and Boyd. They’d left the Camaro by the paved road, run and run and howled with the wind, at the stars, echoing up the canyons. He’d been so glad to show them this, that he could give them this, to share the wild joy and feeling of belonging.
He kept the windows of the truck down as the town fell away and the forest closed in. Low fog hugged the road and crept between the trees, but he could breathe in air clearing of people smells and turning to wild lilac and cedar and pine. There was a park trail through the preserve that led to an old logging road that would give him a good starting point. There had been enough high snowpack last winter that the creeks wouldn’t be dry yet, but they should be passable.
He parked when the path became too overgrown for the car, hung his permit on the rearview mirror even though he’d never seen a ranger, and set out on foot. The borders were weaker now than when he’d felt them as an alpha, vague impressions instead of a steady tug, but they still sang to him. He came to a touchstone and stood with it for a few minutes, resting his hand where so many before him had set theirs, feeling his connection with the life and earth, roots and foundations of his territory like a physical tether.
The touchstones had probably been dropped by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age. They stood sentinel around the woods, huge bits of foreign rock, convenient benchmarks for generations of Hales. He had no idea how old his family’s traditions were, but his mother’s great-grandmother had been Konkow Maidu, and you could still find petroglyphs they left and places they sheltered a thousand years ago, if you knew where to look. It was an odd comfort for Derek, to think of himself as only one person in a long line of people walking through these woods. Maybe someone else would stand in the same place and think about the past, a thousand years after he was dust.
When he moved again, the sun had almost burned through the fog. Pale, black-bibbed chickadees and dark-eyed juncos called and sang, fighting as they flitted between trunks and limbs and bothered the squirrels. Derek stretched to wake up the muscles in his arms and back, breathed in the scents of damp green, secured his bag, and took off running. He dodged branches to race up a leaning tree, flipped over a blackberry thicket, leapt a rushing creek, startled a rabbit out of the brush and chased until he could reach out and touch the soft brown fur. He felt a fierce grin taking over his face, and when he didn’t want to hold it back any longer, he howled, long and loud, even knowing there would be no answer.
He stopped a few hours later, on the top of a rocky bluff that loomed over the trees below. He could follow the dips of snowmelt canyons down toward Beacon Hills, almost hidden under oaks and bay, the neighboring towns sweeping out of the foothills like a river delta, and in the far distance, the Cubist green floodplain of the valley. After his third energy bar, he stood up and took a few pictures with his phone. In a moment of madness, he made one a selfie, smiling behind his aviators with the crumpled blanket of trees behind him. He sent it to Cora. She laughed at him but sent one back, hair back in a messy bun, school books spread out on a table, bright stucco walls behind her.
Don’t make me jealous, she sent. I’m stuck in the valley till the next full moon.
Ask Alejandro if you can borrow a truck this weekend, he replied, and she sent back a cactus and the peach that looked like a butt. She was on the Díaz pack’s resident mechanic’s shit list for a prank gone wrong with guinea pigs and a bucket of honey, and Alejandro would never in this life allow her to borrow a truck by herself. He smirked and stuck his phone in his pocket as he stood up to keep climbing.
The waxing sliver of moon didn't have much pull, so by the time it was up, he was back in the loft, comparing his memory and pictures on his phone to the lines of terrain on a giant map he’d printed a few weeks earlier at Kinko’s. The original was in the town records office, but he had digital proofs and could run a new copy whenever he needed. It was big enough to drape over the sides of the long table, so he’d hung it on the heavy wood sliding door to the back rooms, next to the spiral staircase that went up to the roof deck. Careful dots of marker placed the touchstones, and a thick outline enforced the legal Hale property limit. He filled in lakes and highlighted creeks with blue. He couldn’t decide how to mark the nemeton, so it got a black round sticker. So did the old house. He hatched out some patches to the east, verified by satellite pictures, where logging in the national forest had left regrowing fields. Next was the tricky part. A dotted red line went from between two logged patches, through a creek, across a corner of Hale land, and into the preserve. Whatever had left the track had been big, snapping thick branches easily eight feet off the ground, but he couldn’t find any kind of footprint, fur, or scent, just broken sticks, disturbed scree, and a coating of rocky dust over everything. The track had ended abruptly at a slumping pile and scatter of boulders, but that wasn’t even the strangest part: springy undergrowth had grown up where he’d traced the beginning of the trail, around the scarred trees, and by the end of it the damage was a week old at most, leaves still wilting on severed branches. He had finally given up, baffled, and resigned himself to digging through Peter’s old files.
His phone buzzed and he put down the marker, honestly relieved for an interruption. So. What did you do today? It was Stiles. Derek wondered if he’d checked the GPS while he was out.
Vision quest, he sent back.
Fuck offfffff, then after a few seconds, really?
After a halfhearted deliberation, he sent the selfie.
I am going to print out copies of this and hang them everywhere in town, you weirdo
Do it and I’ll never send another, he typed and immediately deleted. They would never find your body, he sent instead.
Scott would protect me
He doesn’t know these woods like I do, he sent. Besides, didn’t you find a Christmas tamale behind his bed last week? That’s the keen tracking sense you want to trust?
And a dead mouse, it was like mummified, SO GROSS and Derek knew the exact expression he would be making, that ridiculous combination of fascination and disgust. So you might have a point, fine, Stiles continued. Your moment of perfect happiness is safe with me.
Derek stared at his phone for far too long. Do you know of any other rock creatures besides trolls? he finally sent.
Not off the top of my head. Why? Do we have trolls? DO WE HAVE TROLLS? There were an unreasonable number of line breaks.
Why does it seem like you’re excited for trolls? he sent, amused. I’m not sure yet. It looks like a pile of rocks rolled itself three miles, partly uphill, over the course of a few months. He sent a picture of the boulder field, too.
TROLLS ARE CLASSIC, he got back, and then: Buffy never got to fight trolls. I feel like you’re trolling me with the rock thing, though.
Anya’s ex, he pointed out.
You didn’t even have to look that up, did you
There’s so little media with decent werewolf representation.
Oh my goddddd
Derek rubbed the pads of his fingers over the center of his chest. The rock thing is real, as far as I can tell. No ideas besides troll?
A series of texts followed quickly: I’ll check the bestiary, and, There’s rock elementals in World of Warcraft, if that counts. A minute later, It’s a pretty common belief that trolls turn to stone in sunlight like in LOTR, though I always figured that was more like statue-style.
Huh. Thanks. He’d have to keep an eye on it. He had – he checked the map – at least a month before it got anywhere near a road or trail, if it kept moving at the same rate. The sunlight thing he could check now, though, and run a patrol by the pack’s houses after. He grabbed a jacket on the way out the door. Half an hour later he sent Stiles another picture: the same boulder field, in the dark, with bright lines left by fireflies over the course of a long exposure. Still rocks, he sent with it.
Worth a shot, Stiles sent back. Have they moved at all?
No. They’re still, he replied, smiling to himself.
You are the LEAST funny, Stiles complained.
He sent a smiley with sunglasses. Stiles sent him the poop face.
Cora sent a picture with a rusty pickup with no hood behind her victorious grin, Boyd’s stoic smirk, and Alejandro caught smiling proudly at the back of Erica’s head as she picked dead grass out of her hair with fingers black from engine grease. He saved all the pictures in three secure places and cleared his phone for their safety.