The Ritual Made Me His Human Anchor, Now I'm Bound To The Brooding Werewolf

The first victim was a junior from the high school, a quiet girl named Holly. They found her in her bed, sheets tangled around her legs as if she’d been fighting something in her sleep. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling, but seeing nothing. Catatonic. The doctors at Beacon Hills Memorial had no answers.

Two days later, it was a middle-aged man who worked at the public library. Same story. Found by his wife, locked in a silent, waking nightmare from which he couldn’t be roused. Then a third, a freshman from the college.

Three victims in five days. My dad was running on fumes and bad coffee, the entire sheriff's department chasing a ghost. But we knew it wasn't a ghost. It was just another Tuesday in Beacon Hills.

For seventy-two hours, my bedroom had been mission control. The scent of stale coffee and ink hung heavy in the air. My corkboard was a chaotic web of maps, victim photos, and printouts of obscure lore. Scott and the others could fight, they could track, they could use their supernatural senses. But this wasn't something they could smell or hear. This was something that had to be read.

Deaton had given me the first real clue. He’d managed to get a sample from the first victim’s room, a faint, almost invisible dust left on her pillow. He’d called it a "magical residue," ancient and psychic in nature. It was the only physical evidence we had.

I’d been cross-referencing every culture's version of sleep demons, night terrors, and soul eaters. The Incubi, the Mara, the Alp. None of them quite fit. They were physical, or at least left physical traces. These victims were untouched, their minds simply… erased.

The breakthrough came at three in the morning, fueled by my fifth energy drink and the sheer, desperate need for a win. It was a scanned page from a medieval grimoire, the Latin so archaic it was barely translatable. But one word stood out, circled in my red marker: Somnivex.

It wasn't a demon or a spirit. It was a parasite. A psychic parasite that latched onto a person's subconscious. It didn't need to touch them. It projected pure, unadulterated terror directly into their mind, feeding on the fear it generated. It would continue to feed until the host’s consciousness shattered, leaving an empty shell. The fear-induced coma was just the aftermath of the meal.

My heart hammered against my ribs. This was it. The description, the psychic nature, the lack of physical evidence—it all matched.

But knowing what it was wasn't enough. I had to know where it was. The victims lived miles apart, with no connection to each other. I pinned their addresses to the town map, staring at the three red dots, willing them to make sense. There was no geographic pattern. Not at first. But then I saw it. It wasn’t a line, it was a radius. They were all equidistant from a single point.

I grabbed the ley line map I’d made two years ago, the one I kept folded in my desk drawer. I overlaid it on the town map. The center of the circle, the single point the attacks were radiating from, glowed with a sickening familiarity.

The Nemeton. It was the Nemeton. The ancient, magical stump was acting as an amplifier, a broadcast tower for this thing's psychic assault. And with every victim, it was only getting stronger.

I called Scott immediately. “It’s the Nemeton. It’s using it as an amplifier.”

An hour later, I was stuck at home, pacing my room while Scott, Isaac, and Lydia went to face it. Scott had been firm. “It’s a psychic attack, Stiles. You’re human. You’re the most vulnerable. Stay put.” I hated it, but he was right. I was the researcher, not the soldier.

They found the clearing just as I knew they would. The air around the massive stump was unnaturally still, thick and heavy like the moments before a lightning strike. Nothing moved. Not a leaf, not an insect.

“I feel it,” Isaac said, his voice low. His hands were already flexing, the tips of his claws threatening to break through his skin. “It feels… cold.”

Scott nodded, his red Alpha eyes glowing in the gloom. He took a step toward the Nemeton, trying to project an aura of command, of power. “We’re not afraid of you,” he growled, the words meant to be a challenge.

The response was not a sound, but a pressure. A wave of pure, undiluted terror rolled out from the stump, washing over them. It had no smell, no physical presence, but it slammed into their supernatural senses with the force of a physical blow.

Isaac cried out, stumbling back as if he’d been punched. His vision filled with the suffocating darkness of the freezer his father used to lock him in, the scent of stale earth and his own panic filling his nose. His claws shot out fully, not in aggression, but in a desperate, primal defense against a memory made real.

Lydia gasped, her hands flying to her temples. For her, it was a sound—a high, piercing shriek of absolute agony that existed only in her head, drowning out everything else. It was the collective scream of every victim the Somnivex had ever claimed.

Scott stood his ground, his body trembling with the effort. He tried to roar, to assert his authority as an Alpha, but the sound caught in his throat, choked off by the wave of fear. He saw Allison, dying in his arms. He saw his mother, bleeding out on the floor of their kitchen. He saw every failure, every person he couldn’t save, all playing out behind his eyes in a vivid, horrifying loop. His strength was useless. His healing was useless. The fear wasn’t attacking his body; it was consuming his soul.

They scrambled back, retreating from the clearing like beaten animals, gasping for breath. They hadn't been touched, but they were exhausted, their confidence shattered.

As they regrouped at the edge of the woods, another figure emerged from the shadows. Derek Hale. His leather jacket was dark against the trees, his expression unreadable but intense. He hadn't been with them; he’d been drawn by the disturbance, a psychic siren call of immense power.

His eyes swept over them—Isaac shaking, Lydia pale, Scott looking utterly defeated. Then his gaze settled on the Nemeton. He could feel the psychic energy emanating from it, a cold, ancient dread that crawled over his skin. It was a power he hadn't felt since before the fire, something tied to the oldest parts of his family's history. He took a single, cautious step forward and felt the push of absolute terror. He held his ground, his own history of loss and pain a familiar armor, but he knew instantly. This wasn't something you could fight. You couldn't punch a nightmare. You couldn't claw at a feeling.

Brute force had failed. A different weapon was needed. His jaw tightened. There was only one person in Beacon Hills who fought with research and obsessive intellect. The realization settled in his gut with the weight of a stone. He had to go see Stiles.

The sound of knuckles rapping against the front door was so sharp and unexpected that I nearly dropped my laptop. My dad wasn’t due home for hours, and Scott would have just walked in. I shuffled out of the kitchen, my socks sliding on the hardwood floor, and pulled the door open.

Derek Hale stood on my porch.

He looked as if he’d been carved from the night itself, all dark leather and darker scowl. His presence felt too large for the cheerful suburban entryway, an immediate and oppressive weight.

“Lose your way to the Batcave?” I asked, leaning against the doorjamb. “I can give you directions, though my services do require a fee. I accept cash, credit, or brooding silence.”

He didn't so much as blink. His gaze was fixed on me, intense and unnerving. Without a word, he pushed past me, his shoulder brushing mine as he walked directly into my house. The brief contact was like a static shock, cold and jarring. I shut the door, my heart thumping a strange, irritated rhythm against my ribs.

I found him standing in the middle of the kitchen, his hands shoved into his pockets as he surveyed the chaos of my research spread across the table. He looked entirely out of place next to my dad’s ‘World’s Best Sheriff’ mug.

“Okay, you know, usually when someone breaks into my house, they at least have the decency to be a monster I can identify,” I said, crossing my arms. “What do you want, Derek?”

“It didn’t work,” he said, his voice a low rumble. He finally looked at me, and I saw the frustration simmering in his eyes. “Scott. Isaac. They couldn't get near the Nemeton. Whatever is there… it’s not something we can fight.”

I felt a cold knot tighten in my stomach. “Psychic assault versus werewolves. Not exactly a fair fight.” I couldn’t stop the sarcastic edge from creeping into my voice. “So you all tucked your tails and ran. Good to know.”

In a flash, he closed the distance between us, his big hands planting flat on the kitchen table on either side of me, caging me in. His face was inches from mine, and I could feel the heat radiating from his body. His eyes were dark, serious, and stripped of all pretense. “Scott said you know what it is,” he said, his voice low and dangerously quiet. “He said you found a name for it.”

It wasn't a question. It was a demand. And underneath it, something else. A reluctant admission. He was here because he had no other choice. Because for the first time, his power was useless, and my brain was the only weapon left on the field.

My own anger deflated, replaced by the grim reality of the situation. I held his gaze, refusing to look away. “Somnivex,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “It’s a psychic parasite. It feeds on fear. And the Nemeton is its dinner bell. If we don’t stop it, it won’t just put a few more people into comas. It’ll get strong enough to blanket the entire town.”

He didn’t move, but I saw the information register in his eyes. His jaw was tight. “How do we stop it?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” I pushed back gently against the table, forcing him to give me an inch of space. “But I can tell you one thing. It’s going to require a hell of a lot more than claws and fangs.”

We stood there in the silence of my kitchen, locked in a standoff. The animosity was still there, a familiar current between us, but it was tangled with something new: a grudging, desperate necessity. He was the power, and I was the plan. We were two mismatched, jagged pieces of a puzzle neither of us wanted to solve.

“Fine,” he finally bit out, straightening up to his full, intimidating height. “We work together. Until this is done.”

“A temporary alliance with the Big Bad Wolf,” I muttered, running a hand through my hair. “What could possibly go wrong?”