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He’s not happy that Stiles is involved with all of this, but he reminds himself that Stiles is a good kid. He keeps proving he’s a good kid, and eventually he just has to trust that, and trust that he can handle himself. The fact that Derek Hale’s looking out for him is reassuring, though. As Sheriff, his deputies have mentioned when they’ve seen the former murder suspect around town, the way he’s been seen grocery shopping with his pack of teenagers. Stiles is with him as often as not, and the Sheriff’s equanimity at the prospect has gone a ways towards reassuring his deputies and the town at large that Hale’s not a danger.
His deputies try to mention anything unusual they’ve seen around town as a general rule, and it’s a damn good thing the people of Beacon Hills don’t know what percentage of cases are solved by gossip. They’d be electing Berne Gorman, editor of the newspaper, come March.
Rhonda pops her head into the office. “Hey, Sheriff. I wanted to let you know that a bunch of women just checked into the Inn. They say they’re going to be here all weekend for a nature retreat at the Preserve.”
He puts his pen down. “Did Cathy tell them not to camp out there overnight?”
“Yeah, but you know how it is.” She gives him a significant look. Rhonda’s been around for all kinds of weird, and they don’t talk about it, but she’d been next to him when he got the tip from Stiles about the necromancer, and had seen the caller ID.
He nods. “Thanks.”
He won’t go talk to them right away. It’d be odd enough to call attention to if he did, especially with the Mayor having a bug up her ass about tourism and making people feel welcome. He can be as friendly as he likes, but the Sheriff showing up at the Inn is never going to be welcoming.
He gets some more paperwork done, then puts it away and grabs one of the portable printers and lets everyone know that he’s putting himself on traffic duty for the night. They all do it, sometimes, blow off paperwork to go hand out speeding tickets. It’s pretty cathartic, and the money’s good for the department.
He pulls over the Camaro as soon as he sees it, because no one goes for an actual honest-to-God nature retreat in January, least of all in Beacon Hills where the murders have been hell on tourism. Derek looks at him cautiously when he walks up, his window already rolled down.
“Don’t look so worried, son. I just needed to talk to you. Now license and registration so I can look official, and I’ll tell you about the women who just rolled into town. I think they’re your kind of thing.”
Derek obediently reaches for his glove compartment and hands over his registration. It’s still in Laura’s name, and the license Derek hands over is still from New York. The sheriff sighs, because it hurts to watch the kid be this much of a mess. Derek’s tense in the car, hands taut at ten and two, so he gets down to business. “They’re at the Inn, and they’ve said they want to do a nature retreat in the Preserve this weekend. It’s unusual for this time of year, to say the least.”
Derek’s hands unclench, and he takes back the paperwork shoved at him. “Thank you, Sheriff.”
“No problem, son. I’ll let you know if I hear anything else that’s concrete.”
Derek’s putting the registration back in the glove compartment, in what looks like exactly the same position.
“And get the title transferred. I should be ticketing you.”
Derek tenses again, all misery, as the sheriff walks away.
He finishes technically at six, which means he gets out about half past, home by seven. There’s pizza on the table and far fewer werewolves than usual in his living room. Stiles has had people over most Fridays for the past few months, something about pack bonding that he’d happily acceded to since it meant they weren’t out getting into trouble.
Stiles is piling slices of pizza on a paper plate, a concession to manners that ceases to mean anything once there are five on there. Allison’s hovering behind him, looking both fascinated and disgusted and clutching a napkin. “Hey, son, Allison, Lydia.”
“Hey, Dad! We’re just celebrating.”
He grabs a real plate from the cupboard, because, unlike his son, he’s not scared of doing dishes. “What’s the occasion?”
They all freeze, and his stomach drops. If it was something clean and happy, something like teenagers should be celebrating, they wouldn’t be still.
“Peter’s gone,” Allison says, careful.
He nods slowly, and tries not to think terrible things. Peter had violated and manipulated a bunch of children and been legally untouchable because mind control and turning someone into a werewolf weren’t technically crimes. “Yeah?” he says, carefully neutral.
Stiles glances at Lydia, filing her nails and watching a movie in the living room, then says, experimental and slow, “He moved. To Michigan, I think.”
He raises both eyebrows at his kid, who’s never stopped being a shit liar. At least now he feels comfortable enough in their baseline honesty that he won’t break everything between them if he pushes. “Any particular place in Michigan?”
Stiles slumps, like he’d actually been expecting that to pass without comment, then squares his shoulders and looks him in the eye. “Hell, I’m pretty sure.”
His heart breaks for his kid, for all these kids, but he can’t bring himself to even think about treating them as the law would demand. Peter had done bad things, things he should have been serving prison time for. He nods slowly. “Did he leave a forwarding address, or was it a clean break?”
He lingers over ‘clean’ just a little, just to make it an obvious stress, to make the other question obvious: am I going to have to cover up a murder you kids committed?
Stiles swallows hard, and a muscle in the side of his face twitches. He looks, very briefly, like he’s about to cry. “It was clean - I - Ly - Derek says he’s not even going to be answering his phone.”
“Okay, son,” he says, and squeezes Stiles’ shoulder, and goes to drink in his study.
When he goes for another slice of pizza, nearly an hour later, Stiles is curled up with Lydia and Isaac on the couch. He upholds the law, and he believes in right and wrong, but he knows that shades of grey exist. He just - it’s not selfish of him to wish his son didn’t see so many shades of grey, is it?
He drinks, sneaks a third slice of pizza, and sleeps like the dead until his alarm goes off. In the morning they’ve got one person in the drunk tank and the promise of reports on drunk and disorderly calls. The night shift all look beat, so he lets them go a few minutes early: he and Eric on dispatch can probably manage to keep the crime in Beacon Hills under control for ten minutes.
What his kid has done is still weighing on him when Derek Hale comes in. He approves, distantly - if the kid is going to be a deputy, he needs to start showing his face more - but he’s mostly disgruntled, because Derek’s the living embodiment of where his relationship with his son went wrong. Derek might be angry, too, considering Peter had been his uncle. But Derek just looks tired. He comes into the office and closes the door and just stands there.
He sighs, and waves at a chair. “Sit down, son.”
Derek sits, and draws his eyebrows together. “They’re definitely witches. The whole hotel smelled like magic. But there’s something familiar about them, too. I’m not sure what.”
Nodding, he says, “Can’t say I’m surprised. I’d bet they’re the coven from -” he waves a hand “- from the thing. Think there’ll be anything before tomorrow night?”
“There wouldn’t be a point,” Derek says. “The power’s in the full moon.”
“Okay, I’ll go talk to them on my own, since you guys will be all -”
Derek looks even more exhausted, even more like a kid. “Me or Stiles can probably back you up. Everyone else is going to, okay, changed pack bonds take readjustment when -”
He feels all the blood drain from his head, and passes a hand over his hair. Jesus Christ. He’d forgotten that they all lived in each other’s heads. Derek would have to know what had happened to Peter, would probably have felt it. No wonder he looks so much less than usual. “Is that why you weren’t over last night?”
Derek swallows visibly and looks away. “None of the betas feel it quite as much except on the full moon. There were things to do, to clean up. I couldn’t make Isaac stay for that.”
He really wants to give Derek a hug. Derek probably wouldn’t welcome it. So he looks down at his desk and moves a folder and clears his throat.
“It needed to happen,” Derek says abruptly, before the sheriff can say anything else. “And no one’s had an equal alliance with the Aos Si before. The pack came out ahead.”
He nods. “Okay, son. If you need anything, though - I know how hard it must have been.”
Derek nods jerkily. “I’ll let you go. Tomorrow.”
Derek practically flees, and the sheriff sighs. These poor kids. He gets done what he needs to for the day and runs the plates for the women’s cars so he can figure out what he’s dealing with. They’re from San Francisco, it looks like, and none of them are overtly sinister, but he gets a feeling about them, what Stiles calls his bad-guy sense. It’s gonna be ugly. He sighs.
The rest of the day - whatever, it’s work, except for the parts that are about keeping his job come election season. They’d collected most of the yard signs after the last election, but he still needs to order more. When he gets home, Stiles isn’t there, probably out with Scott or Derek, so he heats up one of the pot pies from the freezer and eats it in front of the TV. His mind trickles empty, leaving behind the shape of a plan that’s only a little influenced by improbable crime procedurals. Nothing he can do tonight, though.
He changes into workout clothes, including a reflective vest, and goes for a casual nighttime jog around the neighborhood. It doesn’t count as a patrol if he’s not in uniform, even if it does tell him that there are no strange vehicles around.
Stiles is home when he gets back, getting himself soda in the kitchen. He leans against the door and watches his kid mumble along with whatever’s going through his headphones, and he wonders when Stiles started moving so self-assuredly. Stiles turns around, spots him, and twitches so hard he nearly spills his soda, and that’s a familiar sight. “Dad!”
He smiles. “Hey, son.”
“So tomorrow’s the full moon, so I’m free. Want to catch a movie that’s not on Netflix? I’ll even let you have butter on your popcorn.”
“Derek didn’t say?” he asks, surprised.
Stiles goes preternaturally still. “No. What’s up?”
“There are some women in town, witches we think, so I’m going to keep an eye on them tomorrow night. Derek suggested you might want to come as backup.”
“Okay, yeah, I can do that. Like, how many are we talking?” Stiles sips his soda and shifts his weight, unfrozen now.
*
At least half a dozen, from the number of vehicles around the parking lot. Probably more. Stiles isn’t with him, is with Derek approaching from the other side of the Preserve. He follows the marked hiking trail into the woods, because these women aren’t Beacon Hills natives. The road gets invisible quickly in the dark, but he keeps going another few minutes, flashlight aimed low to the ground. When he’s ten minutes in, he stands still and switches off the flashlight. The preserve isn’t densely treed enough to hide a fire indefinitely, even with all the moonlight. Nothing, not yet. He takes out his phone and sets it to silent and texts his son to let him know when Derek gets a fix. He keeps it in his hand as he goes forward, because the light will be his only notification: vibration’s too loud for the woods.
300 yds north of path drk says
He slips his phone back into his pocket and angles himself north, walking as quietly as he can. It’s not long before he can see firelight, before it resolves into torches and a firepit and women who look wild and dangerous in the flickering flames.
“Ladies,” he says, and steps into the circle of light. “This isn’t actually part of the Preserve: it’s private property, and I’m afraid trespassing and fires are both strongly discouraged by the owner.”
They all turn to look at him, and some of them have eyes that flash with more than reflected fire. He keeps a hand on his gun, but leaves it in the holster. No need to escalate yet, especially when they can probably turn his brain to gravy without ever touching him. It’s not even technically Hale land - nothing is, after the county reclaimed it - but they might be able to be warned off with covert threat of werewolves.
One of them smiles, slow and terrible. “So you do know. I had wondered. How can you excuse someone practicing blood magic with ill-begotten powers?”
“You were here before there was blood magic,” Derek says, looming out of the darkness.
The woman goes red-faced. “Yes,” she spits, “we came before whatever atrocity was perpetuated Friday, but we came because of what happened in September.”
“That’s a long time to wait,” he says.
“Do you know how much power she took?” another woman demands incredulously. “We needed to be prepared to fight that!”
“I call bullshit,” says Stiles, which is incredibly stupid. They’re there for him: he should have stayed hidden. “Someone killed her magically a few months ago. You can’t have thought you were looking for the same person.”
The second woman whirls on the first. “You said it was to find her!”
“It doesn’t matter! He’s using all that power just as horribly as she did!”
There’s a hot rage rising in him. She came here wanting to grab up the power his son had taken on at cost to himself, looking for any excuse to strip it from him, probably kill him, too, and they’re using another of the hard things he’s had to do against him. He keeps his voice level, because he can’t afford to slip, not when he doesn’t know what they can do. “I don’t think you’ve got any room to be passing judgements, here.”
“More importantly,” Derek says, his eyes flickering red, “you have no power here.”
“The hell we don’t,” she snarls, and spreads her fingers.
The flames jump higher, and Derek snarls, but it’s Stiles who holds his attention. Stiles’ face looks like a death mask, and he twists his hand palm-up and abruptly closes it. The fire goes out, not even ashes left smoldering. The torches stay lit, but the clearing’s still darker, and Derek’s eyes are the brightest point of light. “Please leave,” Stiles says. His face is only visible as a pale gleam. “The only things I’ve done have been to protect people or to help people, and I don’t need any help - super late help - from hypocrites and liars and murderers, much less your judgement.”
“You don’t deserve that power,” the woman hisses.
“Shut the fuck up, Janice,” snaps another woman. She continues, stiffly, “Obviously there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. We . . . believed we were here as part of being a self-policing body. Since we were . . . misinformed, we’d appreciate being able to leave.”
The Sheriff reigns in the smug smirk he wants to give them. “I think you ladies might want to think about cutting your trip short, even though it’d be a shame to abandon your rooms at a small independant business.”
The woman who’s elected herself spokesperson nods. “Of course. It’s a small price to pay for the misunderstanding. We’ll get underway right away.”
He gestures past himself at the path, the same way he’d gesture someone to precede him through a door. They smile tightly and go, the spokesperson gripping Janice’s arm tight enough that it looks like it hurts.
He watches them go, leaving their torches behind. When they’re out of sight, the torches abruptly disappear, no sign of them left in the sudden dark they leave behind. He lets out a breath that sounds shakier than it should. Magic is unnerving.
Stiles, nigh-invisible in the filtered light of the full moon, says, “Uh. Well, that went well. I’m just gonna go with Derek to - there’s wolf stuff.”
He nods, tired. “Yeah, go on. Text me if you won’t be home.”
The flashlight illuminates the ground enough to get him back to the parking lot, and the women’s cars are gone.
He drives home, hands at ten and two, exactly at the speed limit. By the time he pulls into the driveway, he’s feeling even more dissociated from the idea of magic and witches and werewolves, even more dissociated from what just happened.
He pours himself a stiff drink.
He leaves it on the table, makes himself leave the room and put away his gun and put on sweats. Stiles looks worried whenever there’s an empty bottle in the recycling, and he knows that it’s - it’s not the best way to respond to things.
The office budget needs reviewing, so he gets the papers from his office and takes them to the kitchen. He tells himself it’s because it’s closer to food. Which is true, as far as it goes, but it’s also that the kitchen feels more quintessentially normal, and the kitchen table’s where he left his drink.
He gets some work done, and it’s grounding. It’s something like twenty minutes later that he thinks of his drink again. He eyes it, considering. He’s alone in the safety of his own home; he’s not on call tonight; one drink, even a stiff one, isn’t really excess.
He drinks, and keeps working on the budget.
He sleeps like the dead.