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When Derek Hale showed up in town, Evan hoped like hell he’d been one of the human members of the Hale pack. It was bad enough that someone had gotten little Laura Hale, had cut her in half like some of the old-school hunters liked to. Derek didn’t need to see that, didn’t need to be around for the investigation, didn’t need to be lurking around where his family had been slaughtered.
So Evan did his work and investigated and hoped to God Stiles hadn’t seen anything out in those woods.
Then there’s an Alpha running around his town killing people and terrorizing teenagers, and there’re only two people it could be, and Peter’s still in the hospital, but Derek hadn’t been spotted until after Laura was dead. Victoria and Chris Argent are good sorts, and they follow their Code, but he’s pretty sure Victoria’s a sociopath and Chris is a little high strung, and they neither of them ever came to see him except as part of Chris’ day job. He’s pretty sure they don’t know that this is his town. Not every Sheriff in the state’s got his knowledge and experience, but it’d be polite of them to check.
Eventually he had to call in someone from the Weird Squad in Sacramento, because even if he remembered Derek as a kid, grief was no excuse for killing people, and the Alpha had threatened his fucking son. Scott and Stiles even blamed Derek for the murders, and Evan wondered what they’d seen, and his heart broke a little. Stiles looked like he wasn’t sleeping again, like he was staying up all night like he had after Claudia succumbed to slow faerie poison.
And then the Martin girl was hurt, and he felt like he’d failed, because his son was apparently the kind of man who let his date be lured out alone and attacked by an Alpha. Worse, so much worse: his son was missing. He turned up, eventually, and Evan was worried enough that he thought maybe he should have told Stiles more of what was out there. But it’d been mostly quiet for years before the Hale fire, and quiet as death after, and he’d thought maybe Stiles could have a more normal life.
But Stiles seemed almost relieved when it took the Martin girl a long time to recover, and when she went missing and Evan had to clear Stiles out of the room so it could be swept for evidence, he noticed that the bloody hospital gown went, too, and he worried he might be too late.
When Peter Hale went missing and then his nurse turned up dead, that was almost a relief, because it meant that the murdering son of a bitch that Evan was going to hunt down wasn’t the same sweet kid he’d slipped cookies. He dug the box of wolfsbane ammunition out of the back of the closet where it had lived since he gave Stiles the combination to the gun safe, and hoped viciously that the wolfsbane lost potency with time so he’d have an excuse to pump the bastard full of an entire clip.
He was loading a clip when the phone rang, and nearly didn’t pick up. Hale had threatened his kid, and Evan was going to take him out for it. But it was work, so he picked up. Then he was being called in for Kate Argent’s death, and that meant he had to go in, because murder always outranked time off. Things were going on and no one was keeping him in the loop, and if it continued like this it’d be like Sacramento all over again.
When he’d surveyed the scene and supervised the removal of the body and noted with relief that the tire tracks at the scene weren’t the Jeep’s and declared that unless the coroner said different it was an animal attack and he was going back to sleep, he drove straight to the Argent’s house. He’d sent a deputy by earlier to break the bad news. He knocked on the door and hitched up his belt and did his best to look like a concerned small-town Sheriff. Chris opened the door and smiled and invited him in and closed the door behind him.
“Victoria’s just in the kitchen.”
Evan nodded and went through and sat at the breakfast bar, solemn and non-threatening. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” said Victoria, and she was calm and controlled and how the hell did she ever pass as normal?
“Where’s Allison?”
Chris moved around behind Victoria, reassuring her with little touches as he got out a beer. “With Lydia. Beer?”
Evan tilted a hand up to ward him off. “Still on duty. And that makes it easier. I don’t want any more Code violations here in town. I don’t know how much you’ve told Allison, but failure to adhere to the Code has caused a lot of grief, and not just for the Hale family.”
They’d both stilled and coiled, and Evan nodded acknowledgement of it. They hadn’t known, then. Overconfidence and failure to do the research, which weren’t his favorite traits in anyone, but could be dangerous in hunters. He bit back a sigh. “I’m not here to drive you out of town. There are going to be omegas in the next few months, and I’d appreciate the backup if they’re out of hand, but I need you to control your hunters.”
Victoria said, “We can do that.”
Evan nodded again and slid out of the chair. “I’ll leave you alone, then. And let my office know when the funeral is so we can do security.”
Chris escorted him back to the door, and Evan was tempted to ask who the new Alpha was, because there had to have been at least one beta besides Derek, but he was afraid, given the last few months, that Stiles might have been one of them.
It would make sense, with the way he wasn’t around on full moons anymore. But Evan had never seen his eyes change, never seen a partial shift, not even noticed any sniffing or excessive strength. So if Stiles was a werewolf now, he was the most controlled new werewolf he’d ever seen. Which meant it could still be something else, could be normal teenage rebellion.
Gerard Argent rolled into town, and murders started up again. Argent was his first suspect, but it didn’t fit. Nothing fit, not really. He put the pieces together as quickly as he could, tried every correlation. Stiles was interested, of course: Stiles had always been interested. But there was something sharper in this, and then he was finding Stiles at crime scenes.
Things got worse, and he found himself opposite his son in an interrogation room, and then not expecting to see an interrogation room ever again.
He’d fucked up, somewhere along the line. His son was lying to him, and mixed up in all the things he and Claudia had debated even telling him about, had wanted to shelter him from until he was at least an adult.
Then Stiles and Scott came to him and told him they knew who it was, and he knew both kids’ tells, and they were telling the truth, even if not all of it. So they went to his old office, the one he might not ever get back, and reviewed evidence.
It went downhill from there, because what the fuck was that lizard doing? And why were high school kids committing murders, anyway?
When it was all over and half of his department was dead and he’d gotten his badge back, part of Evan was just glad that the murderer wasn’t his son. That part of him just felt dirty, though.
His son made first line, and Chris Argent belatedly let him know that there was a spirit of vengeance loose on the town.
Stiles scored, and it was the proudest he’d been in a while. Stiles still moved human-clumsy, human-slow, and he’d obviously worked his ass off, and Evan’s heart was swelling.
After the game - that was something else, and something terrifying. The Whittemore kid dead and his son missing, and the Whittemore kid didn’t look like he’d been killed by anything human, not with those claw marks.
He took care of what he could, and then went home to see if Stiles had beaten him back. Stiles wasn’t there, and Evan was just finishing up a note when Stiles came in, face bruised to hell. Not just his face, either: Evan knew that clutch of shoulder to shield hurt ribs, knew that taut hunched posture to not pull on bruises from body blows. His brain went white.
Stiles was shouting at him, trying to calm him down, visibly upset.
Evan went back downstairs and paced while he decided who to call. Chris Argent wasn’t right, because this didn’t even look supernatural, and the Argents weren’t responsible for every bad thing in town, just some. He was tempted to call the principal of the opposing school, but he was pretty sure that part of the story had been a lie. He called Melissa McCall, to get advice on slipping his son things that will make him feel better without ever having to talk about it. She didn’t pick up.
The Martin girl knocked on their front door, and he sent her up. Claudia had always been able to make him feel better, and the way Stiles talked about the Martin girl it was like he saw that potential in her. She left shortly after, and Evan went up to see his son.
It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good, and then Stiles’ phone went off and he checked his texts and went even paler under his bruising and said, “I have to go.”
Evan hesitated, then nodded. “Okay, son.”
None of this was children’s work, nothing that changed under the moon was anything a child of his should have to deal with, that any child should have to deal with. Trained adults had more wherewithal to deal with werewolves and other things that went bump in the night, weren’t as likely to have their futures ruined, because they could go in with eyes open and an idea of the kind of life they were giving up.
But if his son was already in this, Evan wasn’t going to stop him from doing what needed to be done.
Evan waited until Stiles was gone before he went to his computer and turned on the GPS tracker in Stiles’ phone. He wasn’t going to let Stiles do any of this alone. Stiles drove over to the neighborhood near the old Hale house, was still just briefly, and then drove back towards downtown. There ought to be an app for this, so he could open up his phone and go.
But there isn’t, so he started the wifi hotspot on his phone and got his clip of wolfsbane and swapped it for his normal clip and put his laptop and phone in the passenger seat of his cruiser. He didn’t start up the lights or sirens, and kept to the speed limit, so any deputies out on patrol would think he was running an errand or something. None of them knew, because the two who’d known had died in the lizard attack and he wanted the new ones settled in to the mundane part of Beacon Hills before he even considered telling them.
The GPS lead him into the industrial district, to a warehouse that’d been left empty the past couple years. There are two black SUVs in front of it, and a hole in the wall.
A hole in the wall through which Gerard Argent was crawling, trailing what looked like blood. Evan extracted his flashlight and got out of the cruiser slowly. He played the flashlight over the trail of black, over Gerard, over the marks on his arm that looked like a bite except for where they were spewing black goo.
Gerard spotted him, and Evan could see the moment when he recognized him. “Please,” he said.
This would be the part where a good law-enforcement officer would call for back-up in the form of a paramedic, would help the poor old man up and give him a blanket and then go investigate whoever had hurt him so much. But Evan would never be such a good law-enforcement officer that protecting his own didn’t come first, and Gerard is an Argent and Stiles gets twitchy around the full moon. Evan helped Gerard to his feet and assessed how likely he was to just keel over and didn’t even feel a little bad as he slipped the first cuff on him.
Over Gerard’s protests, Evan manhandled him into the cruiser. Evan didn’t bother saying anything to him, just closed him in and edged back towards the warehouse. Evan heard growling and put away his flashlight and unholstered his gun.
He slipped into the shadows of the warehouse, and spotted a flash of distinctive blue ahead. A muscle in his jaw twitched involuntarily. Of course Stiles drove through the side of a building. There, lit up in the headlights, was the Martin girl, stepping close to a very naked and very alive Jackson Whittemore.
Evan stepped forward, deliberately making noise, and Derek Hale looked over at him, eyes flashing red. Peter oozed out of the shadows, too, and Evan brought his gun up, trained on Derek’s heart. “Give me one good reason not to shoot you where you stand.”
He’d never wanted to use cheesy movie lines, had usually considered him better than that, but Derek had threatened his son, had killed at least eight people. He was damn well entitled to use cheesy movie lines.
Evan saw Stiles move in his peripheral vision, stepping towards him like he was trying to see what was going on, and then he was stepping in front of Hale. “Dad, it’s not what it looks like. Actually I’m not sure what it looks like, but Jackson’s all better, so -”
“He may be your Alpha,” Evan interrupted, and it was surprising how thoroughly it shut him up, “but he’s a murderer and I’m taking him in.”
“But Peter really deserved it,” blurts Scott.
Chris Argent came forward, his daughter trailing behind him, more weapons visible on her than any given pair of his deputies. Chris had his hands up, his weapons holstered, and Evan spared him more attention because at this point hopefully Chris at least would know not to bullshit him.
“This might be a conversation best had while less armed.”
“This is loaded with wolfsbane and I’m not putting it away until someone explains why I shouldn’t shoot the werewolf in front of me. Get out of the way, Stiles.”
“In my nephew’s defense,” said Peter Hale, “he’s only killed me. Not that it wasn’t painful, of course.” Peter is looking disturbingly whole and hearty for someone who’s supposed to be dead, someone Evan had also long assumed to be human just because he wouldn’t heal.
Jackson asked, derailing a lot of things, “Guys? Clothes?”
Evan almost sent Stiles out to the cruiser to get a blanket, but remembered the Argent handcuffed and bleeding in his back seat and went himself. Gerard was gone when he went back out, and he found himself unsurprised: he hadn’t frisked him, after all. He couldn’t have gone far, though. So Evan went back in and told Chris, “Take the Whittemore kid to the hospital, say you found him wandering around as you were taking Allison to Lydia’s house to comfort her. Medical mix-up, amazing paramedics - if you don’t have a stock line for this, leave it vague and I’ll deal with it tomorrow. I also expect a full report of what exactly this looked like from your end, same as what you’d send Gerard.”
There were objections: a great wall of them, from everyone but Peter. Evan addressed Jackson’s first, not least because he was the whiniest and Evan wanted him out. “You need to reassure your parents, son. I’m not sure what you are -”
“Werewolf,” volunteered Peter.
“-but your business can wait until tomorrow, because there are people who care about you who think you’re dead.”
Jackson just clutched the Martin girl tighter, and Evan didn’t even want to know. The two of them moved to follow the Argents, and all four left the building through the door. Allison went last, looking horrified and shell-shocked. Her family could look after her, though, and would have to until he made it around to them and making sure they were okay. It would be easier if he could arrest everyone and keep them in holding until everything shook out, but there weren’t enough cells, and none that were built to hold werewolves, and he was still only one officer and couldn’t feasibly arrest them all, especially if any tried to resist in the least.
Next, going still in order of who seemed most likely to be the victim here, he said, “Isaac.”
Isaac slouched out of the shadows, shirt covered in blood but no wounds visible. “Sir?”
Evan kept his eyes on Derek as he asked, “Did you take the bite of your own free will?”
He snapped straight, eyes gone gold. “Yes. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
If Evan hadn’t seen that basement with his own eyes, he’d consider taking another long hard look at the ‘animal attack’ verdict now. But he’d seen it, and caught the way Isaac was looking at his face now, the way he wasn’t bruised anymore. So he was fine with that finding, even if all he was certain of was that an animal had been attacked. Evan nodded, said, “Go home. Scott, Stiles, you, too. I’ll deal with you later.”
Stiles threw his keys to Scott, who looked surprised when he caught them one-handed. “Take Isaac home and drop off my baby.”
“Stiles,” Evan warned.
“He’s saved my life. If you’re going to shoot him, I’m making you do it in front of me.”
Scott edged warily towards the Jeep and said, “I’m just going to -”
“If you scratch her I will turn your furry ass into a rug.”
Had Hale turned the entire teenaged population of Beacon Hills?
Scott huffed out what sounded like a relieved breath and said, “Yeah,” and got into the Jeep. He started it as Isaac jumped in, and they both seemed happy to get away.
“Derek,” Evan asked levelly, “did you kill Laura?”
“No,” he said.
Evan wanted to believe him. “Peter, you’re looking well for someone just out of the hospital.”
Peter smiled, slow and cocky. “Please, I just came back from the dead. I look fantastic.”
“Did you kill Laura?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, casual as anything. “Laura was an accident, but there was the bus driver, and the video store clerk, and everyone else responsible for the fire. I saved Kate Argent for last, and made her niece watch. I made Allison watch, just so at least one Argent would have a taste of what it’s like to watch their whole family die at someone else’s hands.”
The skin on the back of Evan’s neck was crawling, and Peter was still smiling, pleasant and slightly off.
“Which we killed him for,” said Stiles.
Evan raised both eyebrows, because it was sarcasm or tears that his son had killed someone, even if it didn’t appear to have been very effective. “We?”
“Stiles,” said Derek, all annoyance and thunder.
Evan wanted his son away from them, preferably miles away, but Stiles didn’t look inclined to leave at all, looked barely intimidated at all. “Don’t you dare try to claim that you would have been able to take him out if we hadn’t gotten him crispy first.”
“I know I, for one, am unlikely to forget how instrumental you were to my murder,” Peter said, still in that pleasant tone edged with mania.
“Stiles, get away from him,” Evan said sharply.
Stiles stared at Peter, looked like he was trying to stare him down. “Peter won’t hurt me. He wanted me for his pack before I killed him, and now I’ve saved his Alpha’s ass too many times for him to hurt me.”
Evan couldn’t help the way his heart lurched at the word ‘pack.’ He wanted his son human, human and safe and far away from hunters and the full moon, and his heart was pounding accusations of being too late.
“You’d be so much better off if you’d taken the bite when I offered,” Peter said, leaning into Stiles’ space, and Evan was getting damn tired of being on the outside of their little drama. The armed Sheriff was supposed to command attention at the very least.
“Stiles, are you human?” he asked, because he couldn’t stand not knowing anymore.
Derek replied before Stiles could, just one word: “Spark.”
Of course he was. Stiles had always taken after his mother. At least - at least a spark had to be human, had a choice of where to place his loyalties. Claudia’s had been with Evan, with the path he’d tried to tread between justice and secrets. Alan had always been firmly with the Hale pack, loyal to a fault. His throat closed, because Stiles was still over there, still with the wolves, even when Evan had told him to step away.
Stiles looked at him, a little wide-eyed, and finally took a step towards him. “Dad?”
He took another step, accelerating and opening his mouth like he was going to start spewing words and explanations that Evan was sure would be almost entirely lies. Evan shook his head. “We’ll talk at home. Derek, I expect you to come by our house tomorrow at seven. We’re going to go over some ground rules.”
Stiles was finally in reach, so Evan curled his fingers over his shoulder and pulled him more firmly away from the werewolves, into an awkward hug. Stiles patted him placatingly on the back, and didn’t pull away. “Gerard Argent is out there, bleeding black but not so badly injured that he couldn’t get out of my cruiser. I want my handcuffs back when you come over.”
Aware of the fact that he’s just demanded a trophy of the death of a man he had no evidence committed any crime at all, Evan wasn’t surprised when Stiles stiffened next to him.
What did surprise him was Stiles turning to look at Derek. “He had Erica and Boyd in his basement, strung up with electrified wires.”
Derek didn’t even look at Peter as he snapped, “Go. Get them. Why didn’t you get them out?”
Peter left, disappearing into the dark.
“The beating was kind of distracting,” Stiles snapped.
Derek let out the kind of low growl Evan would if his vocal chords were built that way. It was enough for Evan to holster his gun, that and the sudden need to put his hand under his son’s jaw and tilt his face towards the light. Stiles let him, face bleak and still the way it never should be. “This was Gerard?”
“Yeah. Said it was a message.” He shrugged, looking away. “Not sure to who, but I texted Scott that they were there as soon as he dumped me in the Jeep and told me to go home.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” asked Derek, which Evan thought was beside the point. Hunters or not, Evan would have brought in the man who fucking beat his son, and Stiles should have told him, shouldn’t have fed him lies.
“I don’t have your phone number, dipshit.”
Derek’s eyes glowed red, and Evan reached down for his gun again. But he ran off into the night, too, and Evan stared after him. If not angry at Stiles, then for him, and Evan had really not anticipated the ‘so you know about werewolves, now stay out of it’ speech to turn into the ‘I love you no matter what, son, but dating Alpha werewolves of any gender is a bad idea’ speech.
He squeezed, briefly, into more of a hug, and then steered him to the cruiser. “How long have you known?” he asked quietly.
Stiles buckled himself in. “Peter bit Scott in January. I figured it out a couple days later.” He laughed humorlessly. “I’m actually the one who told Scott. How long have you known?”
Hands tight on the wheel, Evan thought about what would happen after this. Stiles shouldn’t be involved, should be kept far away, but he’d been there under his own power, had been in this for months. Grounding him had never worked. Evan was going to get him some wolfsbane bullets and the books he and Claudia had squirreled away in the attic.
“My partner in Sacramento was bitten.”
Stiles didn’t just take after his mother.