The last thing James "Jay" Hale ever imagined was to begrudgingly return to Beacon Hills, find out his older sister was murdered, and then be forced to go on a wild goose chase after some fuck ass Alpha that seemed to have a particular interest in r...
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CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN:
Please, For The Love of God, Don't Let Him Make The Plan!
✧✧✧✧
The woods of Beacon Hills had always been Jay's home.
Something whoever sent that ominous little text earlier, asking him to stay out, must've conveniently forgotten.
And it wasn't just home in the poetic, "this is where my soul belongs" kind of way, but in the "I spent half my childhood running around barefoot in the dirt, half-feral and convinced I could talk to animals" kind of way.
The scent was always what hit him first—damp bark and crushed pine needles, thick with nostalgia. It was partly what Stiles's natural scent was like for Jay.
(Which maybe should've been his first indication of how his feelings would turn out when it came to him.)
It just smelled like everything before everything, if that made sense. Like breathless games of hide-and-seek under hollowed-out logs. Like afternoons spent building "secret" forts that were about as well-hidden as a neon sign in the dark. Like sitting in the grass watching Derek practise lacrosse with their dad. Like sitting in a tree watching Laura accidentally run over their mom's garden patch while practising for her driving test.
The creatures here still felt like kin, too. Jay had always been one of them deep down—just another restless, wild thing. He'd bribed squirrels with food until they tolerated him. He'd chased butterflies just to watch them scatter. And the birdhouses he and Cora used to paint could still be found clinging to some of the trees, worn and weathered, like old dreams refusing to fall.
And maybe that was why tearing through these woods now made something in his chest twist—knowing that Erica and Boyd had their own dreams of something better. And that, in these very same woods, those dreams were being ripped away in a matter of seconds.
The same woods where Jay's own dreams had come to die.
He'd already lost too much here. He wasn't about to lose anything else.
Or anyone else.
The forest whispered around him like it understood and it was willing to give him this one thing. Like it was more than trees and dirt—something aware, something watching, something sentient, something supernatural. The pines hushed into an unnatural stillness, guiding him through the dark with unseen hands.
Jay charged forward like the demon Derek always accused him of being—breath sharp, pulse wild. Shadows stretched and blurred, but he didn't need to see. His body knew the way, like something ancient was tugging the strings.
And if he stumbled over a large, borderline weird tree stump that definitely shouldn't be there? Well. He wasn't even aware of the fact. As far as he was concerned, he jumped clean over it. And he wouldn't even remember it later either. Not now, not any time before, and probably not in the future either.
