On Fire

CHAPTER FIVE

I didn’t know there was a road here,” Scott said as he and Allison wound through woods so dense the sun was all but blotted out. He carefully turned his head away from her and searched the shadows with his werewolf vision, watching a deer back away and turn tail as the car approached. Birds scattered from the trees. He thought of the cats in the vet clinic, how they had yowled and hissed the afternoon after he’d been bitten. They knew the wolf lurked inside him. It was probably a good thing his mom had given up on having pets because of his asthma. How would he have explained his own cat or dog flipping out every time he came into a room?

Allison cast him a sidelong glance, as if she still thought he was afraid to go this far into the preserve. Mostly, he was trying to figure out if the road could serve as a shortcut to the Hale house. He wanted to keep Derek as far away from Allison as possible.

Then they reached a length of chain strung across the road. A No Trespassing sign dangled from the middle. Scott wondered if it marked the beginning of Hale land. He didn’t really know very much about the Hales. He dimly remembered hearing about the fire. He would have been ten years old when it had happened.

He checked the map on his phone. Jackson—or his phone—was located well past the chain. Allison leaned over and studied it, too; then she looked from the chain to the woods and back again.

“I guess we go on foot from here,” she said. “Let me check in again with Lydia first.”

He approved of her caution, and texted Stiles while he waited.

Guy at motel had heart attack. Think he saw. Go to hospital and try to find out, kk?

Saw what? Stiles texted back.

Think u know, Scott replied. He could tell by Allison’s conversation that Lydia still hadn’t heard from Jackson, and she was getting pretty worried. Allison was trying to comfort her by reminding her, “You know how guys are,” and Scott was insulted. Maybe some guys would go all silent like Jackson had, but he would never worry Allison like that.

I’d just lie to her about where I’d been, like I’ve been doing ever since I met her.

Except . . . he had never lied, exactly. Not yet, anyway.

Allison hung up. She had the world’s longest eyelashes. There was real worry in those dark brown eyes.

“I just don’t get why he hasn’t checked in with her, if he’s okay,” she said.

“Because he’s Jackson?” Scott blurted, then glanced down at his phone as it dinged, indicating the arrival of a message.

Got motel guy’s name off Dad’s police scanner. Alan Seber. Going to hospital.

KK, thanks, Scott texted back.

“You’d just think he’d let her know,” Allison said. She reached behind to the passenger seat and grabbed a warm coat. The gray one. Scott had on a sweatshirt, but he didn’t really need it. The cold didn’t bother him anymore. That wasn’t a big enough plus to make him glad he’d been bitten, unlike what Derek had promised. He’d claimed Scott would grow to love being a werewolf. So far?

No love to be had.

Either Danny had been taking advanced goalie lessons, or he had had a side dish of irritation along with his Gatorade because Jackson hadn’t told him where he was. Either way, he exceeded his four seconds. Then they ran out of hot water in the showers and by then, Stiles had been very happy to be in his room, at home, checking up on the ever-growing mob of zombie sheep in his MMORPG. He kept one ear open for good stuff on his dad’s police scanner.

Then Scott e-mailed him a map featuring a very narrow, one-lane road leading into Beacon Hills Preserve. It looked like you could use it as a back way to get to the preserve from the Hale house.

Chalk one up for technology.

And one for the Hales.

He read Scott’s text about the heart attack. “ ‘Saw,’” he murmured. He listened to the scanner and got the motel guy’s name. He texted back, muttering, “So, Scott, saw what? Saw Derek?”

“Yes?” Derek said from behind him.

“Yeaooww!” Stiles shouted. He turned around to find Derek leaning against the wall. He did that on an irritatingly frequent basis, both at Scott’s house and Casa Stilinksi. He was wearing his black leather jacket and he looked especially pouty and broody. “Could you not do that anymore? It is so not cool.”

Derek leaned over Stiles’s shoulder and picked up his phone. “What motel guy? What’s Scott doing? Where is he?”

“Doin’ stuff,” Stiles said.

Derek looked disgusted and held out Stiles’s phone to him. “Tell him to meet me.”

“He’s kinda busy,” Stiles said.

“Stiles?” Stiles jerked at the sound of his father’s voice from the hallway.

“Gotta get that.” Stiles pointedly shut down his desktop—Derek actually growled—and slid his phone into the pocket of his jeans. “Don’t touch anything,” he ordered the werewolf.

Then he left his room, shutting the door, and went to see what his father wanted. His dad was leaning against the kitchen counter drinking a glass of milk.

“How was lacrosse practice?” he asked.

“Fine,” Stiles said. He waited for his dad to get to the point.

“Good.” He paused with his glass against his chest. “What’s your homework like for the weekend?”

“It’s there,” Stiles said, then realized this conversation was fallout from the very suckish parent-teacher conference. Then he threw caution to the winds and said, “Okay, I admit it, I was listening to the scanner. Some guy at a motel had a heart attack?”

His father narrowed his eyes. “Stiles, how many times . . .” he began, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Just . . . keeled over?”

His dad finished his glass of milk, rinsed it out, and put it into the dish drainer. For some reason, that made Stiles think of his mother, and that made him miss her a little more than usual. Life in his head was accompanied by the soundtrack of a small, eternal, dull ache, but word was that would go away after a few decades.

“Why do you care about some guy in a motel?” his dad asked him.

“I care about all mankind, Dad,” Stiles said, and his father gave him an eye roll.

“Where’s your partner in crime?”

“Home, I guess.” Stiles concentrated on the big-eyed-puppy-dog look. It was clear his dad wasn’t buying, and Stiles wanted to go back to his room to make sure Derek wasn’t, um, sniffing around. “But I’ll get right on all that homework,” he said. He turned to go, turned back. “So the motel guy, is he going to be okay?”

“I’d suspect you of something, if I could figure out what it was,” his father replied. “The motel guy is no longer my responsibility. My field is criminal justice, not medicine.” He crossed to the kitchen table and picked up his olive green lawman jacket. “I’m going back out.”

“Did you get another call?” Stiles asked. “Is something going down?”

“Besides your grades?” His father cocked his head. “Did you take your Adderall today?”

“A gallon of it. Er, I mean, yes.” Stiles gave him a salute. “I’ll be in my room.” Then, just in case, he added, “I’m probably getting together with Scott in a bit. His grades are even worse than mine. I want to help.”

“You’re quite the humanitarian.”

Oh, yeah, right there was the proof that Stiles had definitely inherited his dry wit from his old man.

“You wound me, Dad,” he said.

He zoomed back into his room to find Derek clacking away on his computer keyboard. It seemed so bizarre that an actual werewolf was sitting at his desk, but not as bizarre that his best friend had been turned into a werewolf.

“Hey,” he said. “Keep your paws off.” Derek gave him one of his trademark sour glares and Stiles said, “The deal with the motel guy is that he saw something at a window and it freaked him out so badly he had a heart attack. It wasn’t you, was it?”

“No,” Derek said, but he looked interested.

“Okay, well, I’m going to the hospital to see if he’ll tell me what it was.”

Derek looked uncomfortable. There was something up about him and the hospital. Maybe the fact that half of his sister had wound up in the morgue had put him off the place. Stiles doubted it was the cafeteria food.

“Why would he tell you?” Derek asked.

“Or . . . maybe the nurses will gossip,” Stiles said.

“I’ll go with you,” Derek announced.

“Na-uh,” Stiles protested. He’d just had his daily quota of five minutes with Derek and he certainly didn’t want to overdo it. “You won’t.”

“Look.” Derek leaned toward him and the hairs on the back of Stiles’s neck stood straight up. “You and I both know that guy might have seen the Alpha. And if I can find the Alpha, I can help Scott. So I’m going with you.”

“Okay, okay,” Stiles said. “You can follow in your car.”

“I didn’t come here in a car,” Derek said.

“Okay, fine,” Stiles said, displeased. Maybe if Derek did drive his car more often, instead of jogging all over the place like the Flash, he could cut down on the risk that someone might start to wonder about That Guy with the Eyebrows. He’d already been arrested for murder once—for the death of his sister, actually. Stiles and Scott had had a little something to do with that. Okay, a lot, by announcing that they had found Laura Hale’s torso buried beside Derek’s house. But Sheriff Dad’s crack forensics team had found wolf hairs, and not human hairs, on Laura Hale’s corpse. So Derek had been set free.

“But don’t do anything wolfy in my Jeep,” he said, opening up his door and peering into the hallway. The coast was clear. “Like stick your head out the window and let your tongue hang out—”

“Shut up,” Derek said. “Let’s go.”

What was that?

As surreptitiously as he could, Scott cocked his head and listened to the faint echo of the cracking of a twig. Oblivious, Allison was picking her way down an incline. She had swapped out her heeled boots for flat ones better suited for hiking. It was too bad that she kept so much stuff in her trunk—he could have used the excuse that she wasn’t dressed for investigating the preserve to avoid bringing her there.

Another twig cracked. Allison didn’t hear that one, either. When she caught him looking at her, she gave her hair a toss beneath her knitted cap and kissed his cheek. His anxious frown melted into a grin. Her kiss had made his heart skip a beat.

“We should be close,” she said, wrapping her hand around his and pulling the phone close so she could study the map. “Um, right?”

“It looks like it.” He eased both their hands toward his chest, pulling her close, snagging another kiss. This one lasted longer. Then he put his free hand around her waist and held her as he kissed her again, slowly, savoring it. He felt as though the top of his head would explode. Allison was the first girl he had ever kissed—really kissed, not like in some dumb game like Truth or Dare. His heart thundered and he tried to remind himself that he couldn’t get carried away. If he did, he might shift. And if he shifted . . .

“What was that?” she said, breaking the kiss.

That time, he had heard nothing but the roaring of his own pulse and the quickening of her heartbeat. Even now, he fought to concentrate, and to hear what had startled her.

Then, deep within his mind, he heard the howl of a wolf. It was like an echo inside an echo, and although it was faint, he heard it distinctly: one wolf calling another. Seeking the pack.

He blinked and slid a glance toward Allison, to see if she had heard it, too. She’d heard something.

“What?” he asked.

She frowned slightly, listening. Then she relaxed. “It was nothing. I guess,” she added tentatively. “I thought I heard voices.”

“Like Jackson?” He started to call out Jackson’s name, then wondered if he should. There were two strikes against it: one was that if someone was in the woods who should not be—the Alpha—Scott didn’t want to signal where he was. And the second was, well, it was pretty nice to be alone with Allison when she had her arms around him.

“Jackson?” she called, settling his debate by taking the choice away from him. “Are you here?”

They both listened for a moment. He didn’t hear anything. No Jackson, no wolf howl. Maybe he had imagined it. He was still getting used to being a werewolf; it was hard to know what was really happening and what was going on, because he was changing, becoming something he’d never dreamed existed.

A breeze tickled Allison’s hair against her cheeks as she stood poised, listening. He couldn’t get over how beautiful she was. How warm her skin was, and how good she smelled.

“I guess not,” she said. She pressed her body against his. “Now, where were we?”

Looking for Jackson, he almost replied. But that wasn’t where they were. As he kissed her again, Jackson was far away from where they were.

On another planet, even.

Jackson had never spent much time in the Beacon Hills Preserve. He was either on the field, or in the gym lifting weights, or with Lydia. He didn’t know his way around and he didn’t appreciate coating his Porsche’s custom rims with mud. But now he was standing in front of a crackling campfire, exactly where Hunter Gramm had instructed him to meet, and if the guy didn’t show within the next thirty seconds, Jackson was done.

“I don’t appreciate being jerked around,” he called into the darkness.

“I’m here,” a voice called out. Its owner sounded surprisingly young, maybe still in his twenties, and he was standing behind the fire in the shadows. Squinting, all Jackson could make out was his silhouette, painted up to his shins with orange flames. He was tall, and trim, and that was all Jackson could tell.

“I waited for you all night at that disgusting motel. Why didn’t you show?” Jackson said.

“I got held up. I couldn’t make it,” Gramm replied.

“That’s not good enough.”

“And yet, it’ll have to do.”

Though tired, Jackson forced himself to stay alert and not get intimidated. Everything about this guy was wrong, and he’d been an idiot to take a chance like this. But things were so messed up. It was Scott McCall’s fault. The little twerp had turned into Superman on the lacrosse field, executing all kinds of close-to-impossible gymnastics to steal the ball and racing down the field so fast he had to be on something. Jackson had called him on it, and next thing he knew, McCall’s creepy drug dealer had shown up at school. When Jackson had stood up to him, he’d grabbed him by the neck and, like, gouged him with his fingernails.

The cuts McCall’s supplier had left on the back of his neck weren’t healing. And Jackson was having bad dreams. Terrible dreams. Okay, nightmares, all twisted and confused, like the ones drug addicts and little kids had. He didn’t know how to explain what was happening to him. He was Jackson Whittemore, captain of the best lacrosse high school team in the state. Number one. He drove a frickin’ Porsche. He had a hot girlfriend. Every guy at school wanted to be him.

Except . . . who was he?

“Well?” Jackson said, and his voice wobbled a little. He hated that wobble, hated betraying any sign that he was not in complete charge of the situation. Things had been fine before the start of the school year. Then it was almost as if McCall had concocted some kind of scheme over the summer to ruin his life.

“Well, we’re here now, together, just the two of us,” the guy in the shadows said. He called himself Hunter Gramm, but Jackson doubted that was his real name. “Right? Because what I have to tell you is just for you. No one else.”

“Fine,” Jackson said.

“And . . . you didn’t tell anyone you were meeting me?” Gramm queried.

Jackson wasn’t an idiot. You didn’t go assuring complete strangers—potentially dangerous strangers—that you didn’t have backup. But on the other hand, this guy had already told him that if he, Jackson, shared the contents of that note with anybody, the deal was off. There would be no information, no shared secrets from the lips of Hunter Gramm.

“Tell me what you have to tell me now.” Jackson glared at the shadowed outline. It was scaring him that Gramm wouldn’t show his face. It was too much like his dreams of late. “Or I’m leaving.”

“You sound so much like your father,” Gramm said. He paused a beat and then added, “Your real father.”

“My father is my real father,” Jackson said tiredly. That was what his parents had drilled into him ever since the day they had told him he was adopted. We are your real parents. We’re not your birth parents, but we’ll always be here for you.

“Biological father, then,” Gramm said. “The man in the picture I enclosed with my note.”

Jackson had found the note crammed into his locker, and at first he’d thought it was some kind of joke. But a few hints tossed around among his friends had put that to rest. The picture was a tiny square, and it lay in the pocket of the jacket Jackson was wearing. In it, a guy was holding a newborn and smiling. And the guy looked just like Jackson, only a few years older. But not many. Jackson had studied that picture for hours in the motel, spinning a scenario that his parents had met in college; his mom had gotten pregnant, and they’d decided they were too young to raise a baby—

So they gave me up.

After all these years, that shouldn’t hurt, but it did. His mom had gone on and on about all the advantages she and Dad had been able to offer him that two poor, scared kids could never have. But what he heard under her chatter was, We love you, and they didn’t.

“So how did you know him?” Jackson demanded.

“Do I know him. My dad knows him,” Gramm said. “But they don’t know about you. I put it all together myself. I was reading about the up-and-coming lacrosse players, and I saw your picture. You look exactly like your father.”

Jackson’s mind reeled. He’s alive? He’s around? Did he live nearby?

“Prove it,” Jackson flung at him, trying to regain the upper hand. But he was thrown. He thought he had psyched himself up for this meeting, but until now, the claims of the “private detective” had been hypothetical.

“He was talking about this kid he gave up. He said he liked to call you Q.B. For ‘Quarterback.’ He had those daddy dreams about raising an athletic kid. He’d be proud of you.”

Jackson clenched his fists inside his pockets, careful not to bend the photo. “Q.B.” sounded . . . right. It was almost familiar, a whisper against his memory, like when you couldn’t bring to mind the name of a player on an opposing team but you knew that it would eventually come to you.

But his mom and dad had said they’d adopted him as an infant right out of the hospital. He couldn’t remember something that hadn’t happened.

Maybe my parents knew my father, he thought. He’d never asked questions. But then, they’d never offered answers. It had been a “closed” adoption, they’d said. Meaning that the birth parents hadn’t wanted to be contacted, ever. But was that true?

“So you lied about being a detective,” Jackson said angrily.

“No, I didn’t,” Gramm replied. “I really am a private detective. Got a license and a job.”

“You could have Photoshopped this picture and you know I’m in sports.” He felt so stupid, and so disappointed. Before the start of the school year, and Scott McCall’s crap? He wouldn’t have thought about that note twice.

“You don’t have the money to pay for my information,” Gramm said. “Do you.” It was not a question.

“Don’t worry about getting paid,” Jackson said, sneering at him. Everyone wanted something Jackson had. It was usually money or popularity. The secret? They were exactly the same thing.

“I’d feel better if you could give me a little sample of that money,” Gramm pressed. Then he tossed something into the fire. Jackson pushed on the balls of his feet, ready to retrieve it, but it was just a scattering of leaves.

“I need proof that you’ve got something to sell,” Jackson said.

“Oh, I do, Jackson. Address. Phone. All of it.”

Jackson felt unsteady on his feet. If he could contact his father, would he? Was his mom still with him? He had a hundred questions, a million. If Hunter Gramm had answers, he’d get his money.

In the distance, there was a noise like the cracking of a twig. Gramm shifted his weight.

“I thought I told you to come alone,” he said.

“We’re in a forest,” Jackson shot back, his way of replying without really answering. All kinds of things lived in the forest.

Then suddenly he felt the absolute certainty that they were being watched. And by the way the hair rose on the back of his neck, he was equally certain that he should get the hell out of there.