An Anchor in the Silence

The road into Beacon Hills looked smaller, like it had shrunk while he’d been gone. Stiles rolled down the window of the battered Jeep and let the pine-sweet air hit his face, trying to breathe past the knot that had lodged inside his chest somewhere around Sacramento and had only grown tighter with every mile. Sabbatical, his supervisor had said, all stern kindness. Time to recalibrate. As if he were a misfiring engine that just needed a few minutes of quiet to stop shaking apart.

The station hadn’t changed. The paint was still scuffed at knee height from decades of bored deputies and their boots, and someone had taped a paper snowman to the Faraday cage door even though it was September. Stiles paused in the doorway, fingers flexing around the strap of his duffel in a useless rhythm. He hadn’t told his dad he was coming until he was already on the road. It had felt easier, somehow, to sneak up on home.

“Hey,” he said, and his voice came out lighter than the weight of the moment deserved.

The Sheriff looked up from his desk. The new glasses made him look older in a way that punched Stiles straight in the sternum. Then his father was standing, all soft surprise loosening his face, and Stiles moved because not moving felt impossible. They met halfway, a brief, sturdy hug that smelled like coffee and gun oil and the kind of safety Stiles never found in federal buildings.

“Should’ve called,” his dad said, not letting go for a few extra seconds. “I’d have made something edible.”

“You say that like your chili isn’t a religious experience.”

The Sheriff huffed. “It’s a spiritual trial, at best.”

They did the ritual: Stiles leaned his hip against the corner of the desk, his dad sat, an extra chair materialized from somewhere like it always did. For a minute they just traded narrow smiles and let the hum of the station fill in the spaces.

“So,” the Sheriff said, and the word landed with all the gentle curiosity he could fit into three letters. “Sabbatical.”

Stiles shrugged, tried to make it casual. “They’re letting me pretend I chose to come home and not that they shoved me out for excessive twitching. It’s fine. I’m fine. I just—needed Beacon Hills. And maybe your chili.”

His dad watched him with that cop-dad blend of fondness and x-ray vision. “It’s okay to take time.”

“Yeah,” Stiles said, and swallowed. “Just thought I was past needing to.”

The Sheriff’s hand hovered over a stack of reports, then settled on the top folder like it belonged there. Old muscle memory tugged at Stiles’s attention. “I’m glad you’re here.” He hesitated. “Because—I could use your eyes on something. Off the record.”

That pulled Stiles forward, the knot in his chest twitching like it recognized itself in the words. “We talking weird?” He tried to make it a joke, the way he used to when weird meant teenagers and midnight forest runs and not federal case files with redacted after-action reports.

The Sheriff nodded toward the folder. “We’re calling them animal attacks because people like simple stories. Two hikers by the east ridge, a jogger near Stillwater. No pattern, except—there’s something off. The wounds don’t look like any mountain lion I’ve ever seen. I’ve sent photos to the state pathologist, but… it doesn’t feel right.”

Something inside Stiles uncurled and bristled at the same time. Familiarity and dread, hand in hand. He flipped open the folder. The first photo showed a man in his thirties, skin gray with the waxy stillness of death. Four parallel lacerations raked across the abdomen, too clean at the edges, the flesh discoloring in a way that made Stiles’s scalp prickle.

“Dad,” he said, quiet. “When did this start?”

“First one a week ago. Second two days later. The jogger was last night.” The Sheriff leaned back. “No tracks. No scat. No reports of sightings. I know what that sounds like.”

“Like it’s not an animal.” Stiles kept his voice even, the training that had scraped polish over his old impulsive edges slipping into place. He turned the page. Another victim, more of the same. There was a fuzziness to the ragged lines, not in the image but in the way Stiles’s attention slid off them. Like a word on the tip of his tongue he couldn’t grab.

“Anyone reported… anything else?” Stiles asked. “Static on radios? Power surges?”

His dad’s eyes flicked to him. “We’ve had some communication interference. I chalked it up to the contractor messing with the new repeater. And the—” He cut himself off, mouth flattening. “This town likes to breathe quiet when it should be screaming.”

Stiles exhaled, feeling the old ache flare in his ribs where a trickster’s shadow had once settled in and made a home. He closed the folder and slid it back. “I’ll take a look. Not official, just—curious civilian who happens to have a doctorate in Weird from life experience U.”

The Sheriff smiled, quick and grateful. “I didn’t want to ask. But I wanted you to know.”

“You don’t have to ask,” Stiles said, and then, because this was not a weight he wanted to place on his dad’s shoulders yet: “I should go say hi to a few ghosts. Drive around, convince my Jeep we’re not abandoning it for Bureau cars forever.”

“Take a radio,” the Sheriff said. He dug in a drawer and pulled one out, setting it on the desk. “Humor your old man.”

Stiles took it. It was heavier than he remembered. “Always.”

He left the station with the folder burned into his mind, the fluorescent lights giving way to the softer glare of afternoon sun. In the Jeep, he sat for a second with his hands on the wheel, listening to the creak of the seat and the small, ordinary sounds of the town he had grown up in. He waited for the panic to spike. It didn’t. What came instead was a thin, taut thread pulling at him, leading him down roads he could drive blind, past the high school, past the turn for the preserve.

Beacon Hills wasn’t quiet. It never had been. But beneath the normal noise, he could feel it—the hush before a storm, the held breath. He turned the key, the engine caught, and he let the Jeep carry him into it.

The preserve opened up around him, the trees thinning as the Jeep bumped over the familiar ruts that led to the Hale property. Stiles told himself he wasn’t stopping. He was just making a loop. He had done this drive a hundred times in high school, letting the wreck of the old house sit at the corner of his vision like a scab he couldn’t stop picking.

He eased off the gas as the tree line broke and blinked against the brightness that shouldn’t be there. The ruin was still a blackened footprint and a memory, but the clearing wasn’t empty anymore. A skeleton of framing rose over the foundation, clean lines and new lumber, a rectangle of future cut into the scar. There was a truck parked near a stack of plywood, and a radio sat on the tailgate without sound. No crew. No signs.

Just one man on a ladder, forearms braced as he set a beam, back and shoulders flexing with controlled effort.

Stiles’s hands went loose on the wheel before he could think about it. He pulled the Jeep onto the packed dirt and let the engine idle to silence. For a long breath, he just looked. The slope of the shoulders was familiar in a way that hit like a punch. Derek had always been built like a wall, like a promise of impact, but he’d lost the boyish hardness in his face. His hair was shorter, and the sun had carved faint lines into his forehead and around his mouth. He’d grown into his own gravity.

The ladder creaked as Derek climbed down, turning toward the noise of tires on dirt. His eyes cut to the Jeep, then to Stiles as he shut the door. The moment was stupidly cinematic and nothing like it at all. No orchestral swell. Just wind through tall grass and the dry click of the radio’s knob as it failed to find a station.

“Hey,” Stiles said, because stupid was a safety blanket. “Uh—nice… beams.”

Derek looked at him without a smile and without heat. Just the squint he aimed at problems, as if he was measuring the angles. “You’re back.”

Not a question. Stiles swallowed and shrugged, forcing his shoulders not to hunch. “Temporary. Sabbatical. You know, big word for ‘they told me to sit still before I break something I can’t fix.’”

Derek’s gaze slid over him, quick and not unkind. It lingered a half-second on the radio clipped to Stiles’s belt. “Beacon Hills seems to have that effect,” he said. He turned toward the framed wall like he’d remembered he had work to do. “You shouldn’t be out here after rains. Ground’s soft near the north edge.”

“I know this property better than my own GPA,” Stiles said, and then winced because his mouth hadn’t gotten the memo about being a less irritating adult. “I mean—yeah. Thanks. I’ll keep my Jeep from drowning.”

Derek picked up his hammer. He didn’t put Stiles out of his misery by telling him to leave. He also didn’t ask him to stay. The space filled in with the sound of metal on wood, the thud of nails biting into new framing. Stiles stood there like an idiot for a beat too long, then drifted closer, stopping just outside the boundaries of the foundation.

“You’re rebuilding,” he said, quieter. It wasn’t surprise, not really. It was something he didn’t want to name.

Derek’s jaw moved like he was testing a sore tooth. “I’m building,” he corrected. “The old house is gone.”

“Right,” Stiles said. He looked at the beam Derek was anchoring, at the chalk lines on the poured slab. He could see rooms in the geometry: a kitchen where the light would fall in the morning, a staircase angled to avoid shadows at night. “You draw this?”

“Yeah.”

“Of course,” Stiles said, too fast, because what else did he expect? Derek had always held plans in his hands like they might behave if he gripped hard enough. “It’s good. Not that I know anything about it, but it looks like you know what you’re doing.”

“I’m figuring it out.” Derek finally glanced at him again, something like wariness softening into acknowledgement. “You’re… different.”

Stiles barked a laugh that sounded like it had been left out in the sun. “Aren’t we all?”

“Less noise,” Derek said, studying him as if the words might make Stiles bolt. “More edges.”

Stiles looked down, then up too fast. “I’m still me,” he said, and hoped it wasn’t a lie.

“You always were,” Derek answered, and the simple certainty of it landed somewhere delicate.

They stood in it. The unsaid things lined up around them like trees. The last time they’d been here together, the ground had smelled like wet ash and grief. Stiles remembered Derek’s eyes, too-blue and feral, cutting through smoke. He remembered being too young and too loud and wanting to help anyway.

“Sheriff told you about the attacks?” Derek asked without looking away this time.

Stiles blinked. “He—mentioned it. You heard?”

“Word gets around,” Derek said, expression unreadable. “You’ll be careful.”

It wasn’t a command and didn’t have to be. Stiles nodded. “You too.”

Derek went back to his beam. The hammer sang. Stiles shifted his weight, hands searching for a purpose. “Do you—need a hand?” he asked finally, and then, because he couldn’t help himself: “I can be trained. I am, in fact, trainable.”

For a second, Derek didn’t respond. Then he jerked his chin at the stack of two-by-fours. “You can carry. Don’t trip.”

Stiles moved, grateful for a job. The boards were rough and heavier than he expected. He hauled them in awkward armfuls, aware of Derek’s gaze skimming over him in brief, assessing passes. They worked in a rhythm that didn’t require speech. Stiles fell into it because it was easier than thinking.

By the time the sun tilted lower, sweat was sticking Stiles’s shirt to his back, and he was acutely aware of his heartbeat. Derek wiped his forearm across his forehead and finally set the hammer down. “That’s enough for today.”

“Good,” Stiles said. “Because my arms are filing a grievance.”

“Hydrate,” Derek said, deadpan, and handed him a bottle from the cooler in the truck bed.

Their fingers brushed. It was nothing. It was enough to spark the ghost of heat up Stiles’s wrist. He took a breath and a too-long drink to cover it.

“Thanks,” he said, voice steadier. He capped the bottle and looked at the frame again. Not just lines anymore. The suggestion of a home. “I’ll—leave you to it.”

Derek nodded. “Stiles.”

He turned at his name. Derek’s mouth pressed together like he was stopping two different sentences. When he spoke, it was the safe one. “It’s good to see you.”

Stiles felt it hit and settle. “You too,” he said, honest and awkward. He backed toward the Jeep, the clearing throwing long shadows across his path. At the door, he glanced over his shoulder. Derek had already picked up the hammer again, but his shoulders were looser, his profile less guarded. The skeleton of the house cut into the sky, a shape against the familiar ache of the past.

Stiles got in the Jeep and started the engine. He pulled away slow, the new lines of the house shrinking in the rearview until the trees swallowed them. The thread in his chest tugged again, sharper now, leading him toward something he couldn’t name yet. He kept driving.

He fell asleep harder than he meant to, jeans half-on and the radio from the station propped on his nightstand, mute. The house smelled like dust and fabric softener, the familiar creak of pipes settling him. He thought about Derek’s hands on the lumber, the measured breath, and then the edges of the room blurred.

The dream didn’t arrive like dreams. It slid under the door and filled the corners. Stiles was standing in the preserve, only the preserve didn’t make sound anymore. No insects, no wind, nothing. The silence wasn’t absence—it was presence. It pressed on his eardrums until his teeth ached. He tried to speak, to call out, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth like it had been glued there.

The trees shifted without moving. Something crowded between them, multiplying shadows that didn’t line up with the trunks. He knew this trick. He knew this sensation. A cold slicked down his back, the remembered weight of foxfire in his veins, oily and wrong. The shadows gathered, and in them he saw flickers: a fox mask with hollowed eyes, strings pulled tight over his wrists, the crawl of flies in a room with no windows. He couldn’t look away.

He tried to lift his hands. They were bound to nothing he could see. The silence swelled, bloated, and it was like being dropped under black water; he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t hear his own heartbeat. Panic flashed hot and bright, and the shadows leaned. They elongated into limbs, into the suggestion of a mouth that opened and opened without shape. It didn’t smile. It wanted.

He forced his jaw to unlock. No sound came out. The silence swallowed it. The world constricted until there was only pressure and those hungry edges. An old voice crawled up his spine, not words, more memory than sound: your fear tastes better. He thought he’d buried this, thought he’d compartmentalized it into something manageable, something that didn’t own him. The dream laughed without noise.

The ground gave way. He fell, but there was no wind in his face, no rush. He dropped through the absence of sound, shadows sliding along his arms and throat, dragging nails that left no marks and still hurt. He reached for light and found only the cold, and there, under it, a thrum that didn’t belong to him. A pulse. He grabbed it like a rope.

He woke ripping for air.

The room snapped back around him with a lurch: his ceiling fan, still; the digital clock bleeding numbers; the distant hum of a refrigerator. It took a split second longer than it should have to hear it. Between the normal sounds was something else. The quiet had a weight, like humidity. He rolled onto his side, coughing, and the cough sounded wrong, thin in his ears. He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum and found himself shaking.

“Okay,” he said, voice ragged. “Okay.”

His skin crawled. That wasn’t a metaphor. It tingled like he’d walked through a patch of nettles, like static had built up under his clothes. The hair along his arms stood up. He knew this, too. Not the Nogitsune exactly—this wasn’t that intimate, personal rot—but something had skimmed close enough to leave residue, like a slick fingerprint on glass. He sat up too fast and the room tilted. He breathed through the sway and reached for the radio on his nightstand, turning the volume dial with clumsy fingers.

Dead air. The interference hissed and then guttered out. The silence pressed again, not absolute, but wrong. The wrongness was in his bones. He shoved the covers back and stood, bare feet hitting cold floor. His heartbeat finally made itself known, tripping unevenly against his ribs. He went to the window and dragged up the blind.

Beacon Hills at night was supposed to be a patchwork of porch lights and distant traffic, the occasional coyote yipping in the preserve. He pushed the window open and leaned into the air. He heard the streetlamp buzz and a far-off car pass. But under it, around it, the oppressive layer sat like fog. It wasn’t weather. It was what magic left behind when it scraped too close to skin.

He rubbed at the back of his neck, fingers catching on the line of tense muscle. The memory of the dream clung to him in fragments—shadow mouths and strings—but this was worse because it wasn’t in his head anymore. The residue brushed against him and made his stomach turn, metallic and bitter in the back of his throat.

He let the blind fall and paced to the sink, turned on the tap, splashed his face with water so cold it shocked his breath straight for a second. He braced his hands on the counter and watched water bead on his eyelashes in the mirror. He looked pale. Older. The edges Derek had called out earlier were stark under the crappy bathroom light.

“You’re not here,” he told the empty space behind him, because saying it made him feel less like a nineteen-year-old with possession lines under his skin. “You’re not here. You’re gone.”

The air didn’t answer. The radio on the nightstand crackled once and then went flat again. He stood still and let the wrongness move over him. It wasn’t personal, he decided. If it had a target, it wasn’t him specifically. It was like standing on the edge of a field after lightning had struck. The ground didn’t smoke anymore, but the ozone stickiness clung to everything. He could feel it seep along the baseboards, collect in corners, thin and cold like breath on glass.

He thought about the morgue folder on his dad’s desk. The claw marks with decay at the edges. Derek’s shoulders going tight at the word. He thought about the way the frame of the new house cut into the sky, sharp and clean. He swallowed, throat catching. The residue pulsed once, like it noticed he noticed.

His phone lit where he’d dropped it on the pillow. He didn’t pick it up. He stood in the center of his room and catalogued what felt the worst: the way the hairs at his nape wouldn’t lie down, the faint ache in his molars, the buzzing at the base of his skull. He rolled his shoulders, shook out his hands, and exhaled slow until his lungs stopped stuttering.

When the trembling settled to a fine, manageable buzz, he went back to the bed and sat on the edge, not lying down. He kept the radio within reach, useless or not. He didn’t close his eyes. He watched the door, the window, the dark seam where the ceiling met the wall, and let the thin, cold hum of magic seep under his skin without letting it stay. Outside, somewhere distant, a dog barked once and cut off, like even that sound had been swallowed. He stayed upright and waiting, breath measured, until the night stretched too long to be an accident.

It hit like a blade through sleep—no build, no warning, just a sound that wasn’t sound, bright and thin and savage. Derek’s body jackknifed off the mattress before his eyes were even open. His lungs seized. For a second there was no air, just the shriek sliding through his skull like something hooked and dragging. He was halfway to a crouch, bare feet on cold concrete, teeth bared at nothing.

The loft was dark, the red digits on the stove clock the only proof that time still existed. The scream went on without going on, a filament running under everything. His ears rang, not with familiar tinnitus, not with the aftermath of gunfire—this was a frequency that burrowed into the fine bones behind his ears and sang like pressure. He clapped his hands over them and that didn’t help. It wasn’t external. It curled in the center of his head, high and pure and wrong.

“Stop,” he said, and his own voice sounded like it came from down a long pipe.

The scream fractured. Not silence; worse. Silence that wasn’t empty. The world muffled in a way his instincts rejected. The fridge motor cut and didn’t come back on. Far traffic he could usually track across the freeway blinked out. No neighbors’ pipes. No skitter of a spider in the corner. He’d learned to sleep with a thousand points of input, comfortable in the evidence that the world kept moving. Now it was like a dome dropped over Beacon Hills, swallowing sound in its throat.

The hair along his arms lifted. The scent changed. Ozone and cold clay, old water that never boiled. He inhaled through his mouth and the taste slicked across his tongue, metallic like licking an old battery when he was a kid and Laura dared him. For a second, memory punched through—the echo of Laura’s laugh—and then his brain seized around the present threat again.

His heart jolted, too fast. He tried to track it, count it, to pull himself back into his body. The scream wasn’t screaming anymore, but it left a mirroring inside him: a keen that didn’t belong to a throat. It was pressure, and his instincts went haywire under it. Fight. Claw. Run. Protect. He shoved his fingers into his scalp, grounding in the bite of his nails. There was no physical intruder. He didn’t need eyes to know that. He needed to anchor before his balance blew out.

He crossed the loft in three strides and braced his palms against the cool concrete column that ran ceiling to floor. He pressed his forehead to it, closed his eyes, and took inventory like a drill. Floor under feet. Concrete. Cool. Air moving over shoulders—no, not moving. Bare skin prickling as if air had corners. He forced his lungs to pull and release. His hearing picked up nothing and everything, a smear of white where color should be.

The predator in him hated it. He wanted sounds he could map and categorize, wanted a heartbeat upstairs, a water heater in the wall, a car passing three blocks over. The unnatural quiet dug in hooks. He swallowed a growl to keep from shredding his own throat on it.

Something was pulling. Not just out there in the town, not just the Nemeton’s deep throb under the earth like sleeping rot. It threaded through his chest, like someone had attached a line between his sternum and the center of the preserve. Not pain. Not like the anchor lines he’d felt as an alpha, either. It was cold. It was empty. It made his skin itch like it was too tight.

He lifted his head and let his senses reach. The effort made his vision go white at the edges. Sound tried to rush back in and hit a wall. He growled this time, low and involuntary, the sound swallowed at the first foot away from his mouth. He could smell the residue, though—the faint ash of burned magic without fire. He’d known versions of it before. He’d walked through it in the wake of sacrifices at the tree, in the wake of deaths that mattered. This was cleaner and uglier. Like something had scraped a plate clean and left the cold behind.

He forced himself toward the big windows and pushed them open. The night air slid over him like it didn’t want to touch. He leaned out. The city lights could have been photographs for all the movement he couldn’t track. No cicadas, no dog barking to mark territory, no drunk laughter spilling from a block away. The quiet was an organism. It breathed without breath, a flat-lining masking a different heartbeat.

Derek’s hands were shaking. He looked at them—at the small tremors in fingers that had set beams and wrapped bandage around Stiles’s hand just hours ago—and flexed them once. He was not nineteen. He was not prey. He pulled back from the window and shut it, the slide of the frame sticky in the track. The sound died a foot from his ear.

The scream’s ghost flared. A sharp, insect thread right behind his eyes that made him flinch. It wasn’t random. It was a probe. A test. The kind of thing the world did before it shifted to make room for something that didn’t belong.

The dread didn’t rise like panic. It settled, a heavy, unmovable weight that knew where to sit. He’d felt natural quiet before—the way the world held its breath before a storm, the pause after a packmate’s chest stopped moving. This wasn’t that. This wasn’t the ecosystem adjusting to loss. This was something reaching into the plumbing of the town and turning off valves, closing vents, dampening the pulse until even wolves forgot their own pacing.

He put his palm flat over his own sternum, feeling the answering drum of his heart. It was too fast, but it was there. He turned his head toward the direction his instinct kept dragging him—east, toward the preserve, toward the roots of the Nemeton—and all the fine muscles along his jaw went hard.

The unnatural quiet had cracked. The cover of it, the pretending absence that had made him sleep these past weeks with one eye open and nothing to track, had torn. Whatever had been coiling under it had finally stretched. It was awake. It knew him. Or at least, it knew the shape of a wolf big enough to be useful.

He let go of the column and moved to the sink, not because he needed water but because moving kept him from shredding in place. He ran the tap. Nothing at first. Then a reluctant burble, a thin stream. He cupped his hand under it and brought it to his mouth. It tasted wrong—flat, the mineral profile off, like pipes that hadn’t flushed in months. He spat it out and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.

The clock on the stove ticked over a minute he hadn’t felt pass. He dragged a shirt over his head without looking at it and reached for his keys on habit. He stopped. He could drive to the preserve and stand under the trees and let the thing run his nerves like a bow until he couldn’t hear himself think, or he could wait for the next shudder and learn the edges of it from here.

A breath shook loose. He stood there in the dim, the loft stripped down to bones and shadow, and he knew in a place deeper than logic that Beacon Hills had shifted into a new season. The ecosystem had finally registered the infection. The quiet wasn’t cover; it was symptom. The thing that made it had opened its mouth.

He stared at the door and didn’t go through it. He rolled his shoulders back and paced once, twice, imprinting the steps. He catalogued the feel of his bones, the grip of the floor, the clean bite of his molars as he set them. He wasn’t ready. But readiness wouldn’t matter. The next scream would come. He’d be standing when it did.