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After the night he'd had, John just wanted a quiet cup of coffee and some toast before his son woke up. This, he felt, was not too much to ask from the universe.
Apparently the universe disagreed, because John came downstairs at 7:30 in the goddamn morning to see a man he'd previously arrested for murder grinding coffee beans in his kitchen.
John thought he deserved a medal for not going immediately to his gun safe.
Derek Hale whipped around and froze, his eyes comically wide. John would have laughed if he wasn't a hundred percent sure Hale's appearance in his house was directly connected with the events of the previous night.
Hale slowly took his hand off the coffee grinder. "Sheriff."
John crossed his arms over his chest. "Hale. Care to explain to me what the hell you're doing in my kitchen before eight in the morning?"
Hale ducked his head, looking appropriately cowed. "Sorry, sir. I'll go."
While John was more than happy to let him, there was a tiny problem. "That doesn't actually answer my question," he said. "And I would really like my question answered."
Hale's eyes darted toward the door, like he was thinking of making a run for it. Then he squared his shoulders and said, "Stiles asked me to come over. To explain things to you."
"At seven in the morning," John said flatly.
"Yes," Hale said.
It was a bald-faced lie, because Stiles wouldn't tell anyone to come over before ten. Which meant Hale had been here all night.
John wasn't entirely sure what to think of that.
Footsteps thundered down the stairs, and Stiles came skidding into the kitchen in baggy pajama pants and a T-shirt, throwing himself between John and Hale with his arms outstretched. "Dad, Dad, don't shoot him!"
John raised an eyebrow. That was unexpected. "I wasn't planning on it."
Stiles barreled on, as he tended to do. "He didn't have anywhere else to go, so I let him stay in the guest room. Derek's a born werewolf and he's the Alpha, so he's the best person to tell you about the supernatural and explain everything and we were going to talk about it today anyway and--"
"Stiles," John cut in, "Breathe."
Stiles sucked in a breath like he'd just remembered he needed oxygen to live. "So you're not going to shoot him?"
His kid, seriously. John dragged his hand over his face. "For God's sake, I'm not going to shoot him. Now get some breakfast and take your medication before you forget."
Stiles dropped his hands. "I wouldn't forget."
John sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Stiles. Food. Pills." He turned to Hale, who was still frozen at the coffee grinder. "Hale, coffee." John sank into his chair at the kitchen table and winced at the way his back cracked. "I need caffeine before this conversation goes any further."
***
Ten minutes later, there was a pile of toast on the table, next to a plate of microwaved sausage. John had a steaming mug of coffee in front of him, as did Hale, and Stiles had orange juice and a glass of water. Stiles had swallowed his Adderall with a mutinous look in John's direction, like the ADHD was his fault. John was pretty sure he could lay the blame for that squarely at Claudia's feet, but that was neither here nor there.
He made his way through two pieces of sausage, half his coffee, and a piece of toast before he finally felt awake enough to deal with whatever this conversation would entail.
"So," John said. "Werewolves."
Hale stilled with his mug of coffee halfway to his mouth, and he slowly lowered it back to the table.
John fixed him with a look. "You're a werewolf."
"Yes, sir," Hale said.
"And you're an," John racked his brain, thinking of what Stiles had said a few minutes before, "Alpha? Is that a kind of werewolf?"
"Yeah!" Stiles said around a mouthful of sausage. "He's the leader of the pack, and he--"
"Stiles," John warned.
Stiles snapped his mouth shut and chewed with an angry glare leveled at John.
"I swear we taught you manners," John muttered, and turned his attention back to Hale. "So, Alpha?"
Hale nodded. "There are three types of werewolves. Alpha, Beta, Omega. Alphas are the leaders of the packs, the only ones who can give the Bite. Betas are less powerful, but the more of them in a pack, the stronger it is. Omegas are lone wolves. They don't belong to a pack." Hale hesitated over his coffee. "They tend to be dangerous."
Most werewolves seemed to be pretty dangerous, from John's admittedly limited experience, but he decided against voicing that opinion. "What makes Omegas dangerous?"
"No pack, no anchor, no control," Hale said. "They lose themselves at the full moons."
"An anchor?" John repeated. "What's that?"
"Just what it sounds like," Hale said. "Something to ground you. Something to keep you human. It can be anything, a person, your pack, an emotion..."
"What's yours?" John asked.
Hale lowered his gaze to his plate, jaw working.
"Dad, come on," Stiles said.
John belatedly remembered that Hale's entire family had been murdered in a fire by Kate Argent. Okay, probably a little too personal for the current conversation. "So, you're an Alpha," he said again. "That makes Scott...a Beta?"
"Yes," Hale said. "And Isaac, and Boyd."
"And you...bit them all, to make them werewolves?"
Hale shook his head. "Not Scott. Peter, my uncle, bit him."
John raised his eyebrows. "Your uncle is an Alpha, too?"
"Was," Stiles said. "Then he died, then he used Lydia to raise himself, and now he's a creepy undead Beta werewolf with no actual powers aside from being painfully melodramatic."
"Maybe not anymore," Hale said quietly.
Stiles whipped his head around and flung a piece of sausage halfway across the table. "Wait, what?"
"He had claws when he fought Deucalion," Hale said. "I think he killed one of the Alpha pack."
"Oh shit. Where is he now?"
Hale shrugged. "I don't know. He disappeared once the Alpha pack and Jennifer were dead."
John was lost, but given the look on Stiles's face and the way Hale was glaring his plate into submission, he had a feeling this was all kinds of not good. "Okay, stop. What the hell happened last night, and how worried do we need to be about it?"
Hale took a deep breath. "While you were captive, Jennifer and the Alpha pack came to my loft. Jennifer wanted to convince us to help her, and the Alpha pack..."
"Pulled their standard join or die routine with you?" Stiles asked.
Hale grimaced. "Something like that."
"Wait." John held up his hand. "Standard? You mean to tell me that these people have been coming up to you and threatening you? Repeatedly? And you never notified the authorities?"
Hale kept his gaze fixed on his plate. "They were a pack of Alpha werewolves. There's not much the authorities could do."
John sat back and blinked. "A pack? Of Alpha werewolves? That's a thing?"
Stiles threw his hands up in the air. "That's what I said!"
Hale rolled his eyes, like he'd heard this argument before.
John rubbed his forehead. This was getting more complicated by the minute. He did his best to break it down. "Okay. So this pack of Alphas came to you and...wanted you to join them? Or die, apparently?"
Hale nodded. "Deucalion--he was the leader--wanted my mother's power in his pack. And if he couldn't have it, he wanted to destroy it."
John blinked. "But your mother is--"
He cut himself off. Hale sure as shit didn't need the reminder that his mother was dead.
"When a werewolf kills an Alpha, they take the Alpha power," Hale said. "My sister inherited my mother's power. Peter took it from Laura. I took it from him."
John could read between the lines. Hale hadn't killed his sister; his uncle had. John couldn't imagine losing your only living family like that. "So how the hell is your uncle alive now?"
"I just told you," Stiles said. "He used Lydia's powers to raise himself. She's a banshee."
John boggled. "But that doesn't make any sense."
"Yeah, tell me about it," Stiles muttered around his next piece of toast.
John looked down at his sadly empty mug of coffee and stood up to get a refill. "I'm going to need a lot more caffeine for all of this."
"It's really simple," Stiles said. "Peter bit Scott back in January, we thought it was Derek for awhile, Derek sort of became Scott's werewolf Yoda, then I became Scott's werewolf Yoda--"
"You're not a werewolf," John said.
Stiles waved his hand. "Semantics. We figured it out. Anyway, then Peter killed Kate for setting the Hale fire, then tried to kill all of us, Jackson and I set Peter on fire, and then Derek killed him and became Alpha. After that, Gerard Argent showed up seeking vengeance for his psycho daughter's death, and he was JUST as psycho as she was, and Derek bit Jackson and he turned into a kanima--"
"A what?" John immediately regretted asking. "You know what, no. Don't. Just...stop there. Especially since you've just implicated Derek here in a murder."
"Does it really count as murder if the guy is still alive?" Stiles asked.
John couldn't tell if he was being serious or not. He sat back down at the table with a sigh. "Look, just...let's go back to last night." He had a feeling Stiles was making this far more complicated than it needed to be. "So this Alpha pack has been harassing you for a few weeks now, and last night they came to your home to continue doing so."
"Yes," Hale said.
"And this was while Melissa, Chris, and I were in that cellar," John said, trying to sync up the timelines in his head.
Hale nodded. "Jennifer--she's the dark Druid who took you--intended to sacrifice you three to give her enough power to kill the Alpha pack. Last night was the lunar eclipse, when we're the weakest, and that's when she intended to strike."
John took another sip of his coffee. "Do you know why she wanted to kill them?"
"She was an emissary for Kali before Kali joined the Alpha pack. An emissary is a Druid who works as an advisor for an Alpha, helps them with magic werewolves can't perform, that sort of thing," Hale said, and John was impressed with how he'd anticipated the next question. "Kali had killed her entire pack in order to join the Alphas and left Jennifer for dead. Jennifer came here looking to get revenge."
John frowned. "So why did she go to your loft? If that's what she wanted, why didn't she sacrifice us first and be done with it before she faced the Alphas?"
Hale dropped his eyes to his plate. "She came to get me on her side. We had been...involved."
John's eyebrows shot up his forehead. "Involved? You were dating her?"
Hale nodded jerkily, his jaw clenched so tight it was a wonder John couldn't hear his teeth grinding. Granted, he'd only been talking to the man for about fifteen minutes, but John could tell there was a whole boatload of things Hale wasn't saying, either because he didn't want to talk about it to John or didn't want to talk about it in front of Stiles.
Across the table, Stiles dropped his glass to the table with a bang and gaped at Hale. "Oh my God," he said. "That was the magic."
Hale's shoulders stiffened.
"What was the magic?" John asked.
"Ms. Blake--Jennifer had been using magic on Derek and came to the loft because she wondered why it had stopped working," Stiles said, but he hadn't taken his eyes off Hale. "That was the magic, wasn't it? She used magic on you to make you date her?"
Hale didn't look up from his plate, was gripping the edge of the table so hard his knuckles were turning white and John was pretty sure they were going to have a permanent indentation on that side, and John had a sudden, sick feeling that dating wasn't all Jennifer had forced him to do.
He had more questions in that vein, but did not want to ask a single one of them in front of his seventeen-year-old son. John scrambled for a way to steer the conversation a different direction, and grabbed one of the threads Stiles had mentioned. "You said the magic stopped working. Do you have any idea why that is?"
Suddenly Stiles's eyes went shifty and Hale's shoulders hunched even more, and John had a feeling he was not going to like the answer to that question.
"So...remember how Derek said Alphas have emissaries?" Stiles spread his fingers. "Surprise! I'm Derek's."
John buried his face in his hands. "Oh my God."
"He saved my pack," Hale said quietly. "The Alpha-emissary bond is what broke Jennifer's spell."
John could think of a lot of definitions of "bond" and some of them he wasn't entirely pleased with applying to his teenage son. "Please tell me the bond is metaphorical.”
"Sort of," Stiles said. "It was like, I pledge my magic to you, Derek accepts, a shiny magic light jumps between us, and now we're bonded. It's how we were able to find you and Melissa and Chris last night. Derek's got this, like, internal pack GPS system that lets him know where we are, and because you're my family, you're also pack, and I used magic to boost that so we could find you!"
Well, that was...not as bad as he'd feared, honestly. John sighed. "Do you have any idea what you're doing?"
Stiles bristled, and John held up his hand to ward off the incoming rant. "Kid, I read Harry Potter. I know you need training to use magic, and as far as I know, you haven't had any. Do you have someone here who can help with that?"
Stiles and Hale shared a look, and then Stiles grudgingly said, "Deaton could probably give me some pointers."
"Deaton," John repeated. "Dr. Deaton. The vet."
"He was my mother's emissary," Hale said quietly. "I don't trust him, but he's the only person I know who would have that knowledge."
John had known Alan Deaton for fifteen years. The man donated a hundred dollars to the department fundraiser every year and usually gave a free veterinary check-up to the raffle. And apparently he'd been a magic-using emissary this entire time.
"Okay then," John said. "Stiles, we're going to talk to Dr. Deaton and set up a training schedule for you. If you're going to be into all this supernatural...stuff, you should at least have that."
Stiles made a face. "How long do I have to do that?"
"Until Deaton thinks he can't teach you anything else."
"It's a good idea," Hale said.
"It's like me sending you to Peter for Alpha pointers," Stiles shot back. "Yeah, technically, he has experience, but is it really experience you want?"
Hale flinched, but said, "My mother trusted him. I may not, but I think he'll train you well."
"Then it's settled." John took a sip of his coffee. "We'll contact Deaton in a couple of hours and ask him. And the three of us are going to have these conversations once a week, so you two can keep the local law enforcement updated on all the supernatural things going on in this town."
"But--" Stiles started.
John shook his head. "No buts. I've spent the past year--or more--being in the dark about this stuff. That's not happening anymore. Besides, there are practical concerns. Like, for example, the pile of bodies it sounds like you have at your loft."
"They aren't in the loft," Hale said. "We moved them to the preserve."
There were a list of things John really didn’t want to hear as the sheriff, and “we moved a bunch of bodies” was right at the top of them. He rubbed his temple. "Aw, crap."
"Hey, do you want to explain a bunch of bloody wolfed-out people scattered around Derek's loft?" Stiles said. "At least in the preserve it can be chalked up to another mountain lion attack."
John raised his eyes to the heavens. "So many unsolved cases make so much more sense now. Anyway, this is my point. Things happen that the sheriff's department is going to get involved in, whether you like it or not. It's better if you give me a heads-up so I can figure out how to protect my deputies and keep you all from landing in prison."
"And who's going to protect you?" Stiles argued.
"We will," Hale said. "He's pack."
Once again, his son and Hale had a silent conversation that John wasn't privy to. Previously, this would have concerned him, but now he just wondered if it had to do with that Alpha-emissary bond they apparently had.
Of course Stiles would jump into the danger of the supernatural world with both feet and pledge himself to protect people without having the slightest idea of what he was getting into. Of course he would.
John wasn’t sure whether he should be proud or worried or both.
"Well." He clapped his hands. "Now that that's settled and it's not even nine a.m., I've got a load of housework that I could really use some help with."
"Da-ad," Stiles whined.
John jabbed a finger at him. "I'm letting you skip school today. The least you can do is the laundry. And Hale, I've got some gutters that need cleaning out if you don't have anything else to do today."
Hale slowly shook his head. "I've got to make some calls, but I can help out."
"Good." John mentally reviewed their refrigerator and sighed. "And let me know if there's anything you want from the store. I'll go later today."
Stiles practically jumped out of his chair. "Don't forget some veggies."
John rolled his eyes and grabbed his son by the back of the neck to haul him into a hug. "I won't forget the damn veggies," he muttered. "Stay out of trouble while I'm gone, will you?"
"No promises," Stiles said, voice thick, and he hugged John back hard.
He wasn't sure when his baby boy had become a young man as tall as John himself. The years went by too fast, and this one had been faster than most. It felt like John had missed an entire chunk of Stiles’s life while he hadn’t been looking.
Well, he'd be there now, John vowed. Stiles wasn't doing this alone.
Although, he thought as he looked at Hale, maybe Stiles hadn't been as alone as he'd feared.
John cleared his throat and clapped Stiles on the back once, and stepped away. "Go on, get started on the laundry."
"This is punishment for something," Stiles grumbled, but he headed for the stairs.
John clapped Hale on the shoulder. "Head on out back, I'll get you the ladder."
Hale stood and put his dishes in the dishwasher before heading out the back door. John made a detour through his office to pick up a particular business card before he went to the garage for the ladder.
He met Hale out back and set the ladder on the grass. "Before you get started, I wanted to give you something." John handed over the business card and waited until Hale took it. "That's the therapist Stiles and I saw for a few years after Claudia died. She was...she was good. Helped me get my head out of my ass. Probably should've gone sooner, but..."
But it had taken him an embarrassingly long time to admit he had a problem, and it wasn't until Melissa had sat him down and threatened to call CPS that John had finally agreed to do whatever he needed to. He'd lost his wife; if he lost his son as well, he wouldn't have survived.
Hale stared at the card like John had handed him a live grenade.
John sighed and lowered his voice, though he was pretty sure Stiles wasn't listening. "Look. You don't have to talk to me about it, but it's pretty clear 'dating' wasn't all that Jennifer made you do."
From the way Hale flinched, John knew he'd hit the mark.
He really, really wished he'd been wrong, but there was nothing for it now. "That's...you should talk to someone about it, that's all." He tapped the card. "Dr. Riley is good. All I'm asking is that you give her a call."
Hale slowly tucked the card into his back pocket. "Okay."
"Good." At least he'd taken the card; John would count that a win. "Just throw the leaves onto the ground. We can rake them up later. I'll order us some pizza for lunch."
"Thank you, sir," Hale said, and started climbing the ladder.
John wasn’t terribly familiar with Hale’s tones, but he had a feeling he wasn't just being thanked for the pizza. "Oh, and Derek?"
Derek looked down from the gutters. "Yeah?"
"Guest room's yours for as long as you need it," John said. "You never have to ask, okay?"
Derek was quiet for a few moments, and then asked, "Why?"
"You said it yourself," John said. "We're pack, right?"
Derek stared with a wide-eyed look that made him seem no older than Stiles. He nodded minutely.
John met the nod with one of his own, and headed back inside to see to his own chores.
All in all, he had to say, it was a pretty good start.