Chapter 3: The Night in the Woods
[Whittemore Residence — Friday, September 14, 2011, 9:42 PM]
The police scanner app was garbage.
Jackson had spent twenty minutes scrolling through frequencies on Jackson's laptop, trying to find the Beacon County Sheriff's Department dispatch channel, before accepting that 2011 technology wasn't cooperating. What he got instead was a local news alert on the Beacon Hills community forum — someone had found half a body in the preserve. Hikers. The post was thirty minutes old and already had forty-seven comments, most of them variations of oh my god and is this real and one guy asking if it was a bear.
It wasn't a bear. It was Laura Hale, cut in half by her uncle, and the fact that Jackson knew this while forty-seven strangers typed their theories into an internet comment section made his skin crawl.
He closed the laptop. Stood up. Sat back down. Stood up again.
Stay home. This is the plan. Let it play out. Scott goes into the preserve with Stiles, gets separated, gets bitten. The timeline starts. You don't interfere.
The plan was sound. He'd spent two days building it — mapping every canon event he could remember onto a calendar, identifying intervention points and non-intervention points, deciding where Jackson Whittemore could make a difference and where he needed to stay invisible. Tonight was a non-intervention point. The most critical one. If Scott McCall didn't get bitten tonight, the entire future unraveled. No True Alpha. No pack. No defense against Peter, the Argents, the Alpha Pack, the Nogitsune, the Dread Doctors, the Ghost Riders, all of it. The bite was the foundation everything else stood on.
So stay home.
Jackson grabbed the Porsche keys off the nightstand.
He wasn't going to interfere. He just needed to see it. To confirm that the timeline was holding, that reality matched what he remembered, that this world was the one he thought it was and not some variation where everything happened differently and his entire knowledge base was useless.
That was the rational justification, and he was aware it was a justification, and he went anyway.
---
[Beacon Hills Preserve — 10:15 PM]
The preserve at night was nothing like a television set.
On screen, the Beacon Hills Preserve was moody — blue-tinted, foggy, conveniently lit by moonlight that filtered through the canopy at cinematically useful angles. In reality, it was dark. Not atmospheric dark. Just dark. The kind of dark where the trees stopped being individual objects and became a wall, solid and featureless, and the only light came from the road behind him and the distant orange glow of the town against the clouds.
Jackson parked the Porsche on a fire access road a quarter mile from the main preserve entrance. He killed the headlights and sat in the car with the engine off and the windows cracked. The air smelled like pine sap and damp earth and something sharper underneath — eucalyptus, maybe, or the chemical tang of decomposition that a human nose shouldn't be able to detect but that his brain kept insisting was there.
Cricket noise. Constant, mechanical, filling the silence the way static fills a dead channel.
At 10:23, a powder-blue Jeep rattled past on the main road. Jackson tracked its taillights through the trees — brake lights flaring once, twice, then swinging left into the preserve parking area. The engine cut. Two doors opened and closed.
Stiles Stilinski and Scott McCall. Right on schedule.
He couldn't see them from here. Just hear the faint crunch of footsteps on gravel, then nothing as the forest absorbed them. Two sixteen-year-old boys walking into the dark because Stiles had heard his father's dispatch call about a dead body and decided that investigating it sounded like a Friday night.
Jackson's hands tightened on the steering wheel.
In the show, this scene had been exciting. Season premiere energy — new characters, mysterious circumstances, the promise of transformation. Watching it from a couch, he'd been invested in the drama of it. Scott getting separated from Stiles, stumbling through the underbrush, the Alpha's red eyes in the dark.
Sitting in a Porsche three hundred yards away, knowing it was real, knowing a sixteen-year-old boy was about to have his body rewritten by a monster's bite, the drama felt different. It felt like watching someone walk into traffic and choosing not to shout.
He needs this. The bite makes him the True Alpha. Without it, everyone dies. You don't get to feel guilty about a decision that saves hundreds of lives.
The logic was clean. His stomach disagreed.
---
Time moved wrong. Minutes stretched. Jackson checked his phone — 10:31, 10:34, 10:38. The preserve was quiet except for the crickets and the occasional distant crack of someone stepping on a branch, too faint to place.
At 10:41, police lights appeared on the main road. Two cruisers, moving fast, no sirens. They swept past Jackson's position without slowing — he was parked far enough off-road that the Porsche was invisible in the dark. The cruisers turned into the preserve entrance and their lights strobed through the trees, red and blue, painting the trunks in alternating colors.
More vehicles. An ambulance, lights on but moving at normal speed — responding to the body, not an emergency in progress. A county forensics van. The Sheriff's cruiser, which Jackson recognized from the show's establishing shots even before he read the markings on the door.
Noah Stilinski. Who doesn't know his son is currently fifty yards into the woods looking for the other half of the body his department found this afternoon.
The parking area was filling up. Jackson counted vehicles — seven. He couldn't see the officers from here, but he could hear voices, clipped and professional, coordinating a search grid. Flashlight beams cut through the trees, sweeping left and right.
The search would flush Stiles. That was how it played out — Stiles got caught by his father, Scott got left behind, and in the gap between being abandoned by his friend and finding his way back to the road, Peter found him.
Jackson waited.
At 10:56, he heard it. Distant, muffled by trees and distance, but unmistakable if you knew what you were listening for — a shout. Not pain, not yet. Surprise. Fear. The kind of sound a teenage boy makes when something massive hits him in the dark.
His grip on the steering wheel compressed. Both hands, knuckles white, the leather groaning under the pressure. Every instinct he had — the ones from his previous life, the ones this body came with — screamed at him to move. To run into those trees, to find Scott, to drag him away before Peter's teeth broke skin.
He didn't move.
Thirty seconds. A minute. The cricket noise had stopped. The preserve was holding its breath.
Then — nothing. No scream. No second shout. Whatever happened in the dark between Peter Hale and Scott McCall, it was over. The bite was done.
Jackson sat in the silence and breathed.
---
[Fire Access Road — 11:20 PM]
The ambulance left first, lights on but no siren. That meant Laura Hale's remains, not a living patient. Scott wasn't in an ambulance. In the show, he'd stumbled home on his own, discovered the bite mark, and spent the night confused and terrified.
He's sixteen. He just got bitten by something he doesn't understand in the dark and he's walking home alone and I let it happen.
Jackson turned the ignition. The Porsche started, quiet and precise, and he pulled onto the fire access road with his headlights off, navigating by the ambient light from the town. When he reached the main road, he flicked the lights on and drove.
The streets of Beacon Hills at eleven PM were empty. Streetlights pooled on the asphalt at regular intervals, and between them the dark was absolute. Jackson drove under the speed limit, both hands on the wheel, the heater off despite the chill because the cold helped him think.
Timeline status: holding. Scott bitten. Peter active. Laura dead. Derek will show up within days, looking for answers. Allison Argent transfers to Beacon Hills High on Monday. The dominos are falling exactly where they fell before.
Except now there was a variable the original timeline didn't account for. A dead man in Jackson Whittemore's body who knew every domino's landing spot and had three years of TV-show hindsight crammed into a brain that was already struggling to keep track of which inside jokes to laugh at and which text messages to answer.
He pulled into the Whittemore driveway. The house was dark — Margaret and David asleep, the responsible adults' schedule undisturbed. Jackson killed the engine and sat in the car.
His hands were still shaking. Not from cold.
A sixteen-year-old boy had just been attacked in the woods. Bitten by an Alpha werewolf. His life, his biology, his future — all of it rewritten in the span of a single bite. And Jackson had sat in a Porsche and watched the police lights through the trees and done the math and decided that one boy's pain was an acceptable cost for the world's survival.
That's what this is going to be. That's what I'm going to be. The person who makes the math work.
He got out of the car. The night air hit his face — cool, Northern California cool, carrying the faint smell of the preserve even from miles away. The house key was on Jackson's keychain between the Porsche fob and a gym membership tag, and he used it to let himself in without making a sound.
Upstairs. Bathroom. He brushed his teeth with Jackson Whittemore's toothbrush and rinsed with Jackson Whittemore's mouthwash and looked at Jackson Whittemore's face in the mirror.
Monday. Allison arrives. Scott starts hearing things he shouldn't hear, smelling things he can't explain. Derek appears at the school. And I'm in the middle of it with no powers, no allies, and a Porsche.
The face in the mirror didn't look scared. It looked like Jackson Whittemore — composed, confident, untouchable.
Underneath it, the dead man was counting days.
He turned off the bathroom light and crossed to the bedroom. Through the window, the preserve was a dark line against the sky, stretching from horizon to horizon. Somewhere in there, Scott McCall was stumbling home through the underbrush, pressing his hand against a wound that was already healing in ways he wouldn't understand for days.
And somewhere deeper, in the shadows where the searchlights hadn't reached, Peter Hale was watching. Satisfied. Patient. The Alpha had made his first move.
Jackson pulled the curtain shut.
Monday morning. Scott McCall would walk into Beacon Hills High moving differently, hearing differently, and Jackson would be the only person in that building who knew why.
He picked up the phone and deleted his search history. Then he opened the encrypted file — LACROSSE STATS 2011 — and added one line at the top:
Sept 14. It's real. It's all real.
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