Chapter Text
It used to be, every witch and werewolf this side of the Rockies knew the name ‘Hale’. Every hunter, too; well, that part goes without saying.
They were one of the great families back in the early 1900’s, all the way up through most of the last century. They weren’t one of the old families, the really old ones who could trace their lineages back through Europe for centuries past, but they were strong. They’d proven themselves strong. They’d made a mark on the fabric of this country, in the secret, shadowy places most people never knew about. Derek’s father always told him, one hand on Derek’s shoulder and stone surety in his eyes, that theirs was a name to be proud of.
There weren’t many who’d hunted like the Hales.
The Hale family history was long, and boring, and as dusty as the old mansion in Beacon Hills that Derek’s parents used to make a point of checking in on once a year, though nobody’s lived there since his father’s father died in 1997. They’d been in California since 1873, but they didn’t start hunting until after 1898, when Samuel Hale got back from the Spanish-American war and his brother Luke lost his sheriff’s badge over a string of murders and a pair of omegas, lurking just outside the boundaries of the town. They helped tame the West, before World War I. Lucas Hale and his wife Deborah took down an enormous pack of werewolves working as criminal enforcers in mob-run Vegas during the 20’s; their daughter was Emilia Hale Callahan, and everybody’s heard of the Callahans. Most of the Hale blood that’s left, these days, is married into the Callahans, or the Storms, the Fitzurses down around Louisiana, or gone up into Canada. There’s not a lot of Hales left in California, any more.
It happens. Derek’s aunts and uncles all have their own hunts, and his parents always had theirs. Hunters don’t stay in one place for very long, and it doesn’t do them much good to cling together when there are always more threats out there than white knights shining a light against the darkness. They’re not werewolves. They don’t need packs.
The last time he heard from one of his family members, it was a Christmas e-card from Uncle Peter, wherever Uncle Peter happened to be. It was some ridiculous animated thing with dancing penguins and music that came out of Derek’s laptop speakers when he opened the email in the middle of Starbucks. Very Uncle Peter.
He hasn’t seen Laura since last summer, when he tracked a motorcycle gang of bear-serkr from Phoenix to Dallas, and swung by her place in Austin before he headed back west. She’s up in St. Louis now, he thinks, doing some kind of...consultation, or something, on a coven of witches. Laura likes cities. Derek never got it, really, even while they were living together. Give Derek a shotgun full of wolfsbane shells and a nice, empty forest with no collateral damage roaming around any day.
He’s working with a crew on a job about sixty miles outside of Detroit when the email comes in. Derek’s good alone, but it’s easier to put together some cash and a plausible excuse for your presence, when you’re working with an established hierarchy. This one’s a Callahan job; Derek has enough third and fourth cousins in the family that they call him up when they need an extra hand around.
It’s an easy gig, and Derek’s only here as spare muscle, but he takes his turn on lookout duty, spends his days working out and training with the other guys, reading trashy spy novels, and avoiding his laptop. Peter always does something to it whenever Derek sees him, and it always works faster afterwards, but it pops up with a million ‘helpful’ things Derek doesn’t really need and doesn’t know how to get rid of. He’s not entirely sure how Google alerts are supposed to work, but he doesn’t think they’re supposed to include notifications of property transactions by people he’s never met in towns he doesn’t particularly want to go to. Derek wishes he had any idea whether getting half of this information broke some kind of law; he doesn’t mind engaging in criminal activity, but he really does prefer to know he’s doing it.
Then comes the Thursday morning, a week and a half into January, when his email account opens itself (how does Peter set it to do that, and can he make it stop?), and pops up with a bill-of-sale notification. One foreclosure, sixteen acres, wooded, seven bedroom, four and two half bath, purchased outright three weeks ago, in Beacon Hills, California. Name on the deed: Gerard Argent.
Derek stares at the computer screen for a long time before he grabs his cell phone.
Laura let them foreclose on the house. She let it go three and a half years ago, actually, when Derek turned 18 and they decided to go their separate ways. They hadn’t bothered to even go air it out since their parents died, and none of the other cousins wanted it. She’d have given it to Uncle Peter, but Uncle Peter was in Bhutan, or something, Burma, or Birmingham, and he told her to let it go, so she did. She didn’t need to keep paying the mortgage on a mansion nobody would ever use, just because her great-great-great-grandparents built it from the ground up.
She’s mostly just surprised that nobody bought it before, a house that size. She probably should’ve mentioned it to Derek, but honestly, she’d thought she had. They don’t talk much these days.
“Gerard Argent,” Derek says into the phone, and Laura’s blood runs cold.
“Oh,” she says.
“I’m going, whether you are--”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Laura snaps. She’ll let her little brother face the Argents alone over her dead body, and nobody else will care about this like them. “Sacramento, three days. We’ll drive up together.”
“Make it two,” Derek says. Laura is already logging on to her computer, pulling up flight information.
“Done,” she says. “If you head out there without me, Derek...”
“I know,” he says. “You, too.”
Every hunter west of the Rockies knows the name ‘Argent’, too.
The pack is small. Five members, give or take; they pick up additional betas, here and there, and every so often a hunter will chalk up a new kill out of them, but it never seems to slow them down for long. They move, constantly. Most of the established packs, most packs that are as old as the Argents, they pick a town near the wilds and stay there.
The Argents tend to leave shortly after the bodies start piling up.
Derek’s parents mentioned the Argents, in passing, half a dozen times before they died; he’s run into the name three or four times more since. There are so many monsters out there, and this pack is small, and quick, and hard as hell to track. Nobody’s ever proved that they’re responsible for human deaths, except for those stray betas. Derek knows enough hunters to realize how little that means--but the Argent pack is still around, still running free under the sky.
There are two kinds of werewolf packs that haven’t been slaughtered yet. There are the ones that are too peaceful to be worth the trouble, the ones that live like they’re almost human, the ones Derek just plain doesn’t have time for, whatever the morality of the Code says either way. And there are the ones that are too much trouble to be worth the trouble, so far. Too clever. Too sly. Too dangerous and far too time-consuming to go after with too little chance of results, when there are lone omegas to hunt, and witches to keep an eye on, and big, established, permanent packs to check over.
Well, they’ve bought themselves a base, now. And Derek and Laura have nothing but time.
There are only five members of the Argent pack right now, but that's just fine. Cannon fodder comes and goes. Family is forever.
Gerard Argent is 'Grandpa', or 'Dad,' or 'Sir,' or 'God.' Gerard is red eyes and swift thundering retribution, loyalty that binds like a wolfsbane-rope tether, and Gerard is the werewolf’s native right to kill. Gerard is the inescapable, the omnipresent. He's the Alpha. He's life. He's death.
Chris is the ground that holds beneath their feet and the echo of gunpowder smoke in the air. He's the one last blow that ends a fight, and he's the silence afterwards, the graveyard dirt, the steady arms. He's beta and second, the order. The law.
Victoria is perfume and cooking meat over the faint smell of old blood. She's the castle walls and the barbed wire and the gilded gate, the blooming wall of razor-thorned roses, cashmere comfort over marble. She’s hearth and warmth. She’s solid ice.
Kate is the knife.
Kate is lightning. Kate is a flash of gold and a flash of tooth, the fire that rages in one instant and disappears in the next, the slice of a cruel-sharp claw through skin, laughter and a silver bullet, but most of all, Kate is the knife. She’s the weapon.
Kate is the weapon, and Gerard wields her with skill, just as he uses Chris to set his order and Victoria to keep his castle. They will go anywhere for him, do anything. They are his. Their lives are his, to give or to take. He’s the Alpha. That’s what it means, to an Argent, to be an Alpha, to have an Alpha. This is what it is to be pack.
Allison is the pup. She’s necessary, too, there has to be a pup, a future, to make any of it hold together at all. Allison is half-shifted running through a hundred different forests in the gray morning dawn light, a soft hand whose claws haven’t come all the way in, the raw untrained new cub, half-grown and just coming into her own. She’s the promise of new babies, someday, in the future, to keep the pack on, and on, just as they’ve been for hundreds of years, just as they always will be. Wolf under the moon, and world without end.
The other betas come and go. They’re not Argents. Argents drench the earth in their enemies’ blood, and live forever.
Allison Argent is 17 years old. She’s lived in 23 different states, and moved 39 times. Her ambition is to someday take the pack to Hawaii. The terrain there isn’t what they’re used to, and the isolated islands could be a problem, and she knows perfectly well that planes are dangerous, too easy to predict. Driving is better. Still, it would be nice to see someday. Pop culture says it’s pretty there.
This is her sixth high school in three years. The winter before last was bad, after they tangled with that pair of hunters in Utah. They lost all three of their spare betas and killed both of the hunters, but Grandpa kept the whole pack moving almost constantly until the start of April. Allison had enrolled as a freshman again, for the rest of that school year. She’d rather be a little too old than obviously lost. Of course, that was in Minnesota, and their Freshman year curriculum was completely different than Oklahoma or Montana or Utah had been, but whatever. It’s not like Allison is ever going to need to have read Romeo and Juliet six different times, anyway. If it were that important, Kate would have gotten her a copy.
Allison doesn’t go to school to learn. Her mother’s contacts will fake her grades and transcripts if she eventually needs them, anyway. She goes to fulfill her duty to the pack. She goes because she has a job to do. Grandfather never said she was supposed to like it.
It’s hard to keep your finger on the pulse of every new town, when there’s a new town every six or seven months. Allison’s the one with the most obvious reason to interact with the humans around them, so Allison goes to school. It keeps suspicion down, and it lets her make daily reports to her grandfather, about the mood and the tenor of the town, wherever they are. She’s going to Beacon Hills High. She figures it’ll be just like any of the others.
Allison spends more time around humans than anyone else in her family, but that doesn’t mean she likes them any better. Humans are crueler than werewolves. Wolves only hunt their God-given prey, just like her grandfather always says. Wolves have claws and fangs and bloodlust for a reason. Humans don’t have any of that, but they cause pain just for the hell of it anyway.
Since she was six, Allison has been to 25 schools in 18 states, in 24 different towns. She’s been the Strange New Kid every single time. They’d say the same things about any one of their own who came along, any human. Allison’s just always been able to hear them.
So they smile to her face and then call her a slut or a whore or a princess or a prude, they call her a weirdo and a freak, they call her a bitch. They make bets about how long it will take them to get into the new girl’s pants, to humiliate her in front of the school for fun, to teach her her place.
Well, Allison calls them prey.
The town sheriff has a kid, here in Beacon Hills, and his kid’s a sophomore, so Allison will be a sophomore. She was a senior in Los Alamos, faking her way through remedial algebra and AP English. She’ll be able to pass for whatever age she has to for at least the next three or four years.
Chris will venture out around town, the young businessman trying to provide for his family, talking about internet investments and nothing much at all. Kate will venture out around town seeking out trouble in whatever stray corners and dive bars she can find it in. Victoria will tend to the fort, see to their perimeter, keep them comfortable (keep them safe). The Alpha...he bides his own time. He’ll reveal his own plan in the end. The rest of them will just have to wait.
It’s a good house, with its big back woods and the hidden dungeons beneath. Decades of werewolves must have screamed down there in the Hale cells. Kate’s not the only one looking forward to trying them out from the other side.
Los Alamos was too quiet, on the whole. Chris likes any town where their lives aren’t in danger, but Kate’s been getting restless, and the Alpha’s been subtly flexing his claws at the dinner table for some time now. Beacon Hills should be a good stop for the pack as a whole, which means it will be a good stop for all of them.
The Hale family’s grown quieter and quieter over the past decade or two, flaking away hunter by hunter and bit by bit. It will be interesting to see if their last surviving remnants still know how to put up a fight.
Laura and Derek Hale are professionals.
They’re hunters, from a family of hunters. They could load a shotgun by the time they could walk. They learned the kinds of wolfsbane with their ABC’s. They’re Hales. The name still means something, somewhere.
They hunted with their parents until Derek was 15 and Laura was just about to give it all up for college, and then they hunted together until Derek was old enough to live out on his own. Laura never did get to college. This is what they do.
They’re professionals; Derek can track a werewolf through a dense forest on a moonless night, and Laura could list every single reason that’s a terrible idea, then make a plan to survive it. It’s awkward, when they meet each other in Sacramento, have to organize who’s getting the rental car and where they’re going to stay once they reach Beacon Hills. It’s been three and a half years since they’ve watched each others’ backs in the middle of a fight, and they’ve forgotten the instinct of moving when the other jumps. But they’ve trained for this. They know this. Derek works with new and different hunters nearly every other job, and he hasn’t gotten one of them killed yet. Laura does the same. They know how to adapt.
By the time they drive the hour and a half into Beacon Hills, they’re picking holes in each others’ plans like old times. By the end of the first week sharing a room in the shabby, rent-by-the-week motel, they’re moving around each other in synchronized silence, predicting moves, slipping into a new place. Derek’s rougher now, more abrupt, more final about his plans and his blows; Laura’s more willing to trust in lore than she used to be. They’re not right back where they used to be, but they have a new pattern, and it doesn’t chafe.
So it’s not because they’re rusty, or failing to communicate, that it all goes wrong. It’s not because they aren’t good.
Gerard Argent is better.