The text message had been blunt, a set of coordinates followed by a simple, “Here. Now.” No greeting, no sign-off. Just pure, unadulterated Derek.

So, I drove. The Jeep’s tires crunched over the gravel of the long, neglected driveway leading to the Hale house. I hadn’t been out here in years, not since it was a crime scene, a landmark of tragedy, a place we only spoke about in hushed tones. Now, it was just a meeting point.

The house stood against the grey sky like a skeleton. The fire had taken most of it, but the bones remained, a charred frame that refused to fall. It wasn’t just a ruin; it was a scar on the landscape, a permanent reminder of everything Derek had lost. My hands tightened on the steering wheel. Coming here felt like walking into someone’s open wound.

Derek’s black Camaro was parked near what used to be the front steps. He wasn’t in it. I grabbed my laptop bag and the folder of research, slamming the Jeep’s door. The sound was swallowed by the oppressive silence of the preserve.

The front door of the house was gone, replaced by a sheet of raw plywood with a smaller, functional door set into it. It was slightly ajar. I pushed it open and stepped inside.

The air was cold, smelling of old ash and damp earth. The fire had gutted the interior, but someone—Derek—had cleared the main living area. The floor was bare concrete, swept clean of debris. The walls were exposed, blackened support

beams. The only furniture was a single, scarred wooden crate that served as a makeshift table. And leaning against the far wall, arms crossed over his chest, was Derek.

He looked like he was part of the ruin, a permanent fixture of the tragedy. He wore a simple grey t-shirt that stretched across his shoulders and chest, the fabric doing little to hide the powerful muscles beneath. His expression was guarded, his eyes tracking my every move as I stepped fully into the space. A wave of sympathy, sharp and unwelcome, hit me in the chest. This was his home. This hollowed-out shell was all he had left of his family, and he was using it as a base of operations for a monster hunt. I shoved the feeling down, burying it under a thick layer of sarcasm. It was the only armor I had.

“Cozy,” I said, my voice echoing slightly in the vast, empty room. “You really know how to make a place feel like a home. All it needs is a throw rug and maybe a lamp made out of human bones to really tie the room together.”

Derek’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t rise to the bait. “You have something?”

“Do I have something?” I scoffed, dropping my bag onto the concrete floor with a thud. I pulled out my laptop and set it on the crate, flipping it open. “Sourwolf, I have a dissertation. I have a theory so beautiful it should be framed. I have the key to this whole goddamn thing, probably.”

He pushed off the wall and walked toward me, his steps silent on the dusty floor. He stopped on the other side of the crate, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from him. It was a stark contrast to the chill in the air. He smelled of soap and the outdoors, a clean scent that was jarringly out of place amongst the ash.

“So talk,” he said, his voice a low rumble.

I took a breath and turned the laptop toward him. The screen glowed, illuminating the sharp planes of his face. “Okay. So, our unsub isn’t a person, and it’s not your standard werewolf or kanima. It’s something else. Something that doesn’t leave a physical trace because it’s not entirely physical.” I clicked through a few files, bringing up the victim profiles and the map of Beacon Hills. “I’m calling it the Echo.”

His eyebrows drew together in a formidable line of skepticism. “The Echo.”

“Work with me here,” I said, tapping the screen. “It’s drawn to grief. Intense, overwhelming, crippling grief. The hiker who vanished? His sister died six months ago. The teacher, Ms. Morell? Her husband had a heart attack last year. It finds people who are emotionally vulnerable, people who have a void inside them. And then it… echoes.”

I pulled up the audio file from the hiker’s phone, the distorted voicemail from his dead sister. I didn’t play it, but Derek’s eyes fixed on the file name, a flicker of understanding in their depths.

“It uses their memories, their regrets, their sorrow, against them,” I continued, my words coming faster now. “It creates a lure. A voice, a vision, something only they can perceive. It draws them in, isolates them, and then… poof. They’re gone.”

Derek was silent for a long moment, his gaze unblinking. He was studying my face, then the screen, processing. I could almost see the gears turning behind his eyes, weighing my frantic theories against the hard, physical reality he was used to.

“That’s impossible,” he said finally, but the words lacked conviction. “A scent trail doesn’t just vanish. Something has to physically move them.”

“What if it doesn’t?” I countered, leaning forward over the crate, our faces only a couple of feet apart. The air between us felt thick, charged. “What if it moves their minds? Traps them somewhere? My research turned up a few obscure folklore references to psychic parasites. Beings that feed on emotion, not flesh. They don’t need to drag you into the woods if they can just pull you into your own head.”

His skepticism was still there, etched into the hard line of his mouth, but a new look was creeping into his eyes. A flicker of recognition. He stared at the screen, at the web of connections I had drawn, the lines linking places of tragedy—the hospital, the cemetery, this very house.

“A psychic parasite,” he repeated slowly, the words tasting strange in his mouth. He looked up from the laptop, his gaze meeting mine. The green in his eyes seemed darker in the dim light. “My mother used to tell us stories. Old lore, things her mother told her. Warnings. There was one about a creature that fed on sorrow. It didn’t have a name. She called it a whisper-thief. She said it was drawn to broken hearts, that it would sing you a song of your own sadness until you followed it into the quiet.” He shook his head slightly, as if dismissing a ghost story. “We thought it was just a tale to make us be strong, to not wallow.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room ran down my spine. “A whisper-thief,” I breathed. “A Siren of Sorrow. An Echo. It’s the same thing.”

Derek didn’t answer. He just stared at me, his expression unreadable. The wall of his doubt was still there, but a crack had formed. He saw the shape of my theory, and it fit a shape from his own past, a monster he’d been told was only a myth.

The words hung in the dead air between us, heavy and real. A whisper-thief. A Siren of Sorrow. The folklore from his childhood and the data on my laptop converged into one terrifying point. For a second, the only sound was the low hum of the computer and the distant rustle of wind through the skeletal trees outside. I felt a strange, cold thrill of validation mixed with a much larger dose of pure dread. We weren’t just hunting a monster; we were hunting a ghost story, a nightmare made real.

Derek’s gaze was locked on mine, intense and unnervingly perceptive. He was no longer looking at me like I was an annoyance. He was looking at me like I held a piece of a puzzle he’d been staring at his whole life without realizing it was incomplete. The space between us, which had been charged with antagonism, was now filled with a different kind of energy—a shared, dawning horror.

Just as I was about to speak, to break the spell with some stupid, inappropriate joke, the air itself seemed to shift. It grew thick and heavy, pressing in on my ears. The screen of my laptop flickered violently, the neat lines of my research dissolving into a burst of static. A low hum vibrated up from the concrete floor, through the soles of my shoes.

And then I heard it.

It wasn't a memory. It wasn't in my head. It was as real as the cold air on my skin, as clear as Derek’s face in front of me.

“Mischief?”

The voice was my mother’s. It was the soft, questioning tone she used when she’d find me up to no good, a sound I hadn’t heard in over a decade. It was impossible. It was here.

My heart didn’t just speed up; it stopped. It slammed against my ribs once, a painful, concussive blow, and then ceased to beat altogether. The blood drained from my face so fast I felt dizzy, a cold wave washing down my entire body. Every muscle locked. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. My universe, which a moment ago had contained the Hale house, Derek, and a monster problem, had shrunk to a single point: that voice. A ghost’s whisper in a ruined house. My entire being strained to hear it again, terrified that I would and terrified that I wouldn’t.

The laptop screen snapped back to normal. The humming stopped. The world rushed back in, loud and jarring. I was still frozen, my hands hovering over the keyboard, my eyes wide and fixed on the empty space just past Derek’s shoulder.

I was vaguely aware of Derek moving, a subtle shift of his weight. He didn’t speak. He didn’t ask what was wrong. I could feel his eyes on me, though, and I knew what he would be sensing. The frantic, rabbit-fast thumping of my heart as it violently restarted. The scent of sheer, undiluted panic pouring off me.

Slowly, I forced my gaze away from the empty air and back to him. His expression wasn't mocking or impatient. It was unnervingly still. He watched me, his green eyes dark and serious, and in them, I saw an awful, quiet understanding. He had seen this before. He had seen people haunted. He lived it every single day in this very house, surrounded by the ghosts of his entire family. He recognized the look on my face because he’d probably seen it in the mirror.

My throat was tight, dry. I swallowed, and the sound was like sandpaper. I had to say something, do something to shatter the fragile, terrible silence that had fallen. I had to put the armor back on.

“Power surge,” I managed to choke out, the words feeling like lies in my mouth. My voice was thin, reedy. I cleared my throat and tried again, aiming for casual and landing somewhere near strangled. “Weird. Must be the… uh… the ghost in the machine.”

I attempted a laugh. It came out as a pathetic, shaky puff of air. My hands were trembling, so I clenched them into fists on the crate, my knuckles white.

Derek didn’t call me on the lie. He didn’t press. He just held my gaze for another long second, and his silence was a form of mercy. It was an acknowledgment. A silent treaty that recognized we were both standing on haunted ground, and that my ghosts had just as much right to be here as his. He gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod, and the tension in his shoulders seemed to ease, as if he were consciously stepping back from a wound he had no intention of probing.

I had to get out of there. The walls, which were already ruins, felt like they were closing in, squeezing the air from my lungs. The ghost of my mother’s voice was clinging to the ash in the air, and if I stayed another minute, I was going to either start screaming or start crying, and neither option was acceptable in front of Derek Hale.

“I’m hungry,” I announced, the statement loud and abrupt in the oppressive quiet. I shoved my laptop into its bag with more force than necessary, the zip sounding like a gunshot. “I can’t hunt monsters on an empty stomach. It’s a rule. I’m getting food.”

Derek blinked, his focus shifting from my face to my frantic movements. He looked completely thrown, as if I’d just started speaking in tongues. “Stiles…”

“Nope. Food. Now.” I slung the bag over my shoulder and started for the door, my legs still feeling unsteady beneath me. “You want anything? Or do you just subsist on pure, unadulterated rage and brooding? Because I’m pretty sure they don’t have that on the menu at the diner. I can ask, though.”

He didn’t answer, just watched me with that intense, unnerving stillness. I didn’t wait for a reply. I just needed to be in my Jeep, with the windows down and the radio on, away from the suffocating presence of this house and the echo of my mother’s voice.

The drive was a blur. I don’t remember putting the key in the ignition or pulling onto the road. One minute I was in the shadow of the Hale house, the next I was at the counter of the 24-hour diner, ordering enough food to feed a small army of werewolves. Two double bacon cheeseburgers, a mountain of curly fries, another regular order of fries just in case, and two Cokes. The sheer, idiotic normalcy of it was exactly what I needed.

When I got back, the loft was exactly as I had left it, except Derek was no longer standing by the crate. He was sitting on the edge of the raised platform where his bed should have been, his large frame looking out of place against the stark, empty backdrop. He looked up as I entered, his eyes tracking the grease-stained paper bags in my arms.

I didn’t say anything. I just walked over to the concrete crate we’d been using as a table and started unloading the bounty. I set out the burgers in their waxed paper wrappers and dumped the entire carton of curly fries directly onto a stack of napkins in the center, creating a greasy, golden pile. The smell of fried potatoes and grilled meat filled the cavernous space, a warm, savory scent that fought back against the cold smell of ash and decay.

I slid one of the burgers toward him and popped the top on a Coke, pushing it across the rough surface. He watched the offering for a second before reaching out to take it. His fingers were long and calloused, wrapping around the can.

We ate in silence. It wasn’t the tense, antagonistic silence of before. It was something else. Quieter. The only sounds were the crinkle of paper, the fizz of the sodas, and the soft crunch of fries. I focused on my burger, devouring it like I hadn’t eaten in days. It was a physical act, a grounding one. Chew, swallow, breathe. It kept my mind from spiraling back to that voice.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Derek. He ate with a surprising lack of animalism. There was no growling or tearing; he just unwrapped the burger and took a clean, efficient bite. I watched the muscles in his jaw work, the strong line of his throat as he swallowed. He looked tired. More than tired, he looked weary, worn down to the bone in a way I hadn't seen before. The shadows under his eyes were deeper here, away from the moonlight.

He reached for a curly fry from the pile, his fingers brushing against mine as I did the same. A jolt, small but sharp, shot up my arm. It wasn't magic or supernatural energy, just the unexpected contact of his skin against mine. His skin was warm. I pulled my hand back too quickly. He didn't seem to notice, or if he did, he gave no sign, simply popping the fry into his mouth.

I risked a direct look at him. He was staring at the pile of fries, his expression thoughtful. He wasn't looking at me like I was a problem to be solved or an annoyance to be tolerated. The shared, simple act of eating greasy food in a half-destroyed building had shifted something between us. We had faced down a piece of my deepest trauma, and he hadn't used it against me. He had given me space. And now I had brought him a burger. It was a bizarre form of communication, but it seemed to be working. The wall between us, that massive barricade of history and mistrust and sarcasm, felt… thinner. I could almost see through it, to the man sitting on the other side of the fries, who was just as haunted as I was.

The last of the fries disappeared. I crumpled my burger wrapper into a greasy ball and stuffed it back into the paper bag, along with Derek’s. The silence, which had been comfortable, started to stretch, becoming thin and awkward now that the distraction of food was gone. The purpose of my being here rushed back in, bringing with it the memory of my mother's voice. A chill, unrelated to the night air, traced a path down my spine.

"Well," I said, my voice too loud. I pushed myself to my feet, brushing crumbs from my jeans. "This has been... surprisingly productive. And cholesterol-filled. I should probably go. Let my dad know I haven't been ritually sacrificed or anything." I gathered the rest of the trash, my movements jerky and efficient. I needed to keep moving.

Derek didn't respond. He just watched me from his perch on the platform, his expression unreadable in the dim light. His stillness was unnerving. It always was. It felt like a predator’s patience, but tonight, it felt like something else. Like he was waiting for the right moment to speak, weighing his words with a care I wasn’t used to from him.

I slung my laptop bag over my shoulder, the weight of it familiar and grounding. "Okay. So, I'll keep digging into this Echo thing. You... keep doing whatever it is you do. Sniffing things. Brooding. The usual."

I turned to leave, my sneakers crunching on some unseen debris on the floor. I was almost at the door, my hand reaching for the cold metal, when his voice stopped me.

"Stiles."

It wasn't a command or a growl. It was just my name, spoken in a low, even tone that cut through the silence. I stopped, my back to him, and waited. I heard him move, the sound of his boots on the concrete floor. He wasn't coming toward me, but away, toward the far, shadowed corner of the loft. I heard the scrape of metal, the groan of a heavy lid being opened. I turned around slowly.

He was crouched over a large, scorched metal footlocker I hadn't even noticed before, half-hidden under a dusty tarp. He pulled something out. When he stood up and turned back toward me, he was holding a book.

It was old. The leather binding was a deep, dark brown, almost black, and cracked with age. It had no title on the cover, only the faint, scarred impression of the Hale triskele pressed into the hide. He walked toward me, his steps measured and deliberate, his gaze fixed on my face. He didn't stop until he was only a few feet away, close enough that I could smell the scent of old paper and leather coming off the book, mingling with his own scent of rain and forest.

He didn't just hand it to me. He opened it, his thumbs swiping across the brittle, yellowed pages with a surprising gentleness. He found the page he was looking for and held it out for me.

My eyes dropped from his face to the book. The text was handwritten in an elegant, looping script, the ink faded from black to a soft brown. At the top of the page was a detailed, unsettling drawing of a creature that was half-woman, half-shadow, its mouth open in a silent scream. Beneath it, a title was scrawled: The Siren of Sorrow.

"My great-aunt wrote about something like this," Derek said, his voice low. He tapped a finger on a specific paragraph. His finger was steady, the nail clean. I found myself staring at his hand, at the stark contrast of his warm skin against the ancient, fragile paper. "She called them psychic parasites. They don't have a body of their own. They latch onto places with strong residual emotion. Grief, mostly. They use it to manifest, to create lures."

My eyes scanned the passage his finger indicated. It whispers with the voices of the lost, crafting an irresistible song from regret. It does not feed on flesh, but on despair, drawing its victim into a waking dream from which there is no escape, leaving behind an empty shell…

My blood ran cold. It was my theory, but written down a century ago. It was real. The voice I heard… it was a lure.

I looked up from the book, meeting his gaze. His eyes were intense, a deep forest green that seemed to absorb the dim light of the loft. There was no skepticism in them now, only a grim seriousness.

"Take it," he said, pushing the book into my hands. It was heavier than it looked, solid and real. My fingers brushed against his as I took it, and that same small shock went through me again. This time, I didn't pull away.

I clutched the book to my chest, the worn leather a strange comfort. "Derek, I..." I didn't know what to say. Thank you felt inadequate.

"Be careful, Stiles," he cut in, his voice dropping even lower, becoming gruff, almost rough. "This thing… it heard you. Now it has your scent. It knows what you grieve."

The words hung in the air between us, heavy and sharp. It wasn't a threat. It wasn't an order to stay away. It was a warning, raw and genuine. It was concern. From Derek Hale. The world tilted slightly on its axis. He was worried about me.

I could only nod, my throat too tight to form words. I held his gaze for a second longer, seeing the flicker of something vulnerable in his eyes before the familiar mask of stoicism slammed back down. He gave me a short, jerky nod in return, then turned and walked back to the shadows, leaving me standing by the door with his family's history in my hands. I left without another word, the weight of the book a heavy promise of the danger to come, and the echo of his warning a fragile, terrifying shield.