Chapter 8: Letting Them Die
[Whittemore Residence — Saturday, September 24, 2011, 8:15 AM]
The headline was three paragraphs long and said nothing useful.
BEACON HILLS BUS DRIVER FOUND INJURED IN ANIMAL ATTACK. The community forum had already spun up forty comments. Jackson scrolled through them on his laptop, sitting at the kitchen counter with a plate of cold toast he'd forgotten to eat, and matched the public narrative against the one he carried in his head.
Garrison Myers. Bus driver. Connected to the Hale fire — he'd driven the bus that transported the insurance investigators who'd closed the case early. Peter's list was arithmetic: everyone who'd helped cover up the murder of his family, subtracted one by one.
The phone on the counter buzzed. Danny: beach today? told you i'd teach you to actually stand on a board.
Jackson stared at the message for ten seconds. Then he typed: what time.
Danny: 11. bring sunscreen you vampire.
He closed the laptop, finished the toast, and went upstairs to find a pair of swim trunks in Jackson's closet. They were designer — of course they were — with a brand name stitched into the waistband that would have cost Jackson's previous life a week's salary.
The burner phone sat on the nightstand. No messages from Derek since Wednesday, when they'd met at the Hale house for their second conversation — two hours of Jackson feeding Derek sanitized information about the county's investigation failures while Derek listened with the particular intensity of someone deciding whether to trust or terminate. Derek hadn't texted since the arrest news broke. Either he couldn't — they'd have taken his phone — or he was choosing silence.
He's in a holding cell right now. He'll be released by Monday. Peter can't afford to let Derek stay locked up — he needs Derek for the endgame. Derek's arrest is a speed bump, not a wall.
Jackson pocketed both phones, grabbed his keys, and drove to meet Danny at a beach where people would be tanning and laughing and building sandcastles while a man with claws worked his way through a kill list two towns over.
---
[Beacon Hills Beach — 12:30 PM]
The Pacific was cold enough to hurt and Danny found this hilarious.
"You're standing wrong." Danny paddled closer on his board, water streaming off his wetsuit. "Your weight's too far back. It's like watching a baby deer on ice."
"I'm standing fine."
"You're about to—"
The wave hit. Jackson went under — salt water up his nose, sand scraping his knee, the board's leash yanking his ankle as the current spun him sideways. He surfaced coughing, and Danny was already laughing, the kind of full-body laugh that bent him forward on his board.
"—fall," Danny finished.
Jackson swam back to the shallows, dragging the board behind him. His knee was raw. His sinuses burned. The afternoon sun sat heavy on his shoulders, and the water was a blue so deep it looked manufactured.
"Again?" Danny called.
"Again."
The second attempt lasted four seconds longer. The third attempt — nine. By the fifth try, Jackson found the balance point, the spot where his weight shifted forward enough that the board stopped fighting him, and he rode a chest-high wave for twelve seconds before gravity and inexperience conspired to dump him into the foam.
Danny whooped from the lineup. The sound carried over the water, clean and uncomplicated, and for a moment Jackson let himself hear it as exactly what it was: a friend, celebrating a small victory, on a warm Saturday in California.
They ate tacos on the sand afterward. Fish tacos from a truck near the boardwalk, wrapped in foil, dripping lime and hot sauce. Danny ate three. Jackson ate four, because Jackson's body burned through food at a rate that demanded constant refueling, especially after a week of gym sessions and a lacrosse game the night before.
"You're different," Danny said. Not accusatory this time. Just factual. He was leaning back on his elbows, watching the water.
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true." Danny tilted his head. "But today — today feels more like you. Like whoever you used to be, before the whole..." He waved a hand vaguely. "Performative thing."
"Performative thing."
"Come on, man. The swagger. The attitude. The picking fights with anyone who looked at you wrong. I've known you since third grade. You weren't always like that. You used to be — I don't know. Quieter. More real."
Jackson wrapped up his taco foil. The word real sat in his chest like a fishbone. He wasn't the Jackson Danny had known in third grade. He'd never be that kid. But the version of Jackson Whittemore he was building — the strategic, restrained, purposeful one — apparently registered as an improvement. Close enough to the original's buried better nature that Danny recognized it.
"Maybe I'm just tired of trying so hard."
Danny looked at him. The analytical pause was there — it was always there, with Danny — but this time it resolved into something warmer.
"Okay," Danny said. And it sounded like he meant it.
They packed up at four. Jackson dropped Danny at home and sat in the driveway for a minute after he went inside, watching the sprinkler system activate on the lawn next door. The water arced in perfect parabolas, catching the late sun, turning briefly to gold before falling.
Garrison Myers is in the hospital. The video store clerk is next. Or was he first? The sequence is fuzzy — the show aired these events over two episodes, and the timeline was never explicitly stated. Peter's moving, and I'm sitting in a car watching sprinklers.
The phone buzzed. A news alert from the Beacon Hills community app.
SECOND ANIMAL ATTACK — VIDEO STORE EMPLOYEE FOUND DEAD.
Jackson read the notification twice. Closed his eyes. Opened them.
The sprinkler kept turning, gold and silver and gold again. Danny's house was warm behind its windows. Somewhere in Beacon Hills, a man whose name Jackson couldn't remember was lying in a video store with his throat opened, and Jackson had eaten tacos and learned to surf while it happened.
You could have warned him. You could have gone to that video store at any point today and told that clerk to leave town. You could have called in a bomb threat, faked a gas leak, done anything to get him out of Peter's path.
And Peter would have found another time. Another place. And Peter would have started asking why his targets kept receiving warnings. And a burned, vengeful Alpha werewolf with nothing left to lose would have gone hunting for the person doing the warning, and that person was a human teenager with no supernatural defenses and a Porsche.
The math was clean. The math was always clean. The math said: let them die now so more people live later.
Jackson pulled out of Danny's driveway and drove home under a sky that was turning purple at the edges.
Note:
Please give good reviews and power stones itrings more people and more people means more chapters?
My Patreon is all about exploring 'What If' timelines, and you can get instant access to chapters far ahead of the public release.
Choose your journey:
Timeline Viewer ($6): Get 10 chapters of early access + 5 new chapters weekly.
Timeline Explorer ($9): Jump 15-20 chapters ahead of everyone.
Timeline Keeper ($15): Get Instant Access to chapters the moment I finish writing them. No more waiting.
Read the raw, unfiltered story as it unfolds. Your support makes this possible!
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/Whatif0