The Call of the Wilder
Chapter 2: The Criminal Career of Derek Hale
From now on, Stiles and Scott want Dagny present at all of their lacrosse practices, just in case something werewolf-y happens. Dagny agrees reluctantly. To her surprise, Monday afternoon, Lydia waves at her from her seat on the bleachers and motions at the empty spot between her and Allison. Dagny takes that to mean she wants her to sit with them.
So she does.
And it is really effing weird.
Lydia and Allison are nice enough, Dagny thinks, but it's kind of awkward at first. She and Allison hit it off rather quickly, but every time Dagny thinks Lydia is starting to warm up to her, the other girl throws out some vapid comment about one of the lacrosse players or their girlfriends or Coach Finstock or Greenburg.
And then Scott dislocates Jackson's shoulder.
Lydia, Allison, and Dagny all jump up at the same time and let out screams. Lydia immediately rushes down as everyone circles around Jackson. Allison is watching in horror, but Dagny is staring at Scott, whose eyes are currently glowing yellow. Stiles immediately grabs him and starts hauling him over to the boys' locker room, and Dagny knows she can't follow. She sends them a text instead: What the heck just happened?! Reply ASAP!
But then Lydia follows Jackson to the emergency room, which leaves Allison without a ride. Which means Dagny is obligated by the girl-code to drive her.
And, to her surprise, she actually kind of enjoys hanging out with Allison. The other girl is sweet and fun and has a surprisingly good voice when they sing along to the radio. Allison gives Dagny her phone number when they get to her house, and Dagny kind of starts thinking that maybe she's made a new friend.
When she pulls into her driveway, she isn't surprised that her parents aren't home yet. She is surprised, however, when she goes to unlock the front door and a man's voice says from behind her, "You're Dagny Wilder, aren't you?"
Dagny whirls around and lets out a little shriek.
Because it's Derek Hale.
And he wasn't standing there five seconds ago.
"What are you doing here?" Dagny demands, backing up until her back hits the front door, wishing she was holding her dad's shotgun so she could protect herself.
Not that it would do much good against an effing werewolf, but still.
Derek scowls and takes a step forward. "Scott shifted today, didn't he?"
"What?" Dagny asks. "Shifted? What does that-?"
"Today during lacrosse practice," Derek growls. "He almost shifted in front of that Jackson kid."
So that's what happened. Scott and Stiles still haven't texted her back, and judging by the look in Derek's eyes, Dagny is kind of sort of thinking that she's, like, about to die.
"I mean, I guess he did," she hinges. "I don't really know what happened. He and Stiles haven't answered any of my texts-"
"I need you to give Scott a message from me," Derek tells her. "If he plays in that game Friday night, he won't need to worry about the hunters anymore."
Dagny hesitates. "He- he won't?"
Derek shakes his head. "No. Because if he exposes us, I'll kill him myself."
The next moment, Derek is gone, and Dagny's legs give out on her. She crumples onto her front stoop and wonders just what she and the boys have gotten themselves into.
Scott and Stiles aren't happy when she tells them what happened later during their nightly, three-way phone call. But then again, she's not happy that they left her earlier that day and then she didn't hear from them for nearly two hours. They almost get into an argument, but Scott, ever the peace maker, calms the three of them down, and they decide to end the call.
None of them sleep well that night.
The next day Allison sits next to Dagny in English and Lydia compliments her on her shirt in Chemistry. This is strange. Dagny is more than just a little introverted, and has what her dad calls social anxiety. Because of this, Scott, Stiles, and Valerie from Home Ec. are her only friends (and Valerie isn't even a real friend. They're just partners in the class and wave at each other in the halls). But when Allison invites her and Stiles and Scott to hang out after the game during Geometry, Dagny agrees.
Because, she thinks, having girl friends might be nice. Scott and Stiles are fine, yes, but Dagny gets tired of watching them wrestle each other and talk about sports and play video games, and sometimes, even though she doesn't like admitting it, she wishes that she had someone to talk about clothes to or to just be a girl with.
And sure, she's used to being alone- and she doesn't mind it all that much. Really, she doesn't! But some female companionship, once in a while... would be welcome.
So Dagny is in a good mood up until lunch, when Scott grabs her arm and demands that she drive him to the Hale House so he can confront Derek about "harassing Allison".
"Oh my God," Dagny says cluelessly as Scott drags her out of the cafeteria, visions dancing through her head of Derek sneaking up on Allison or magically appearing in her bedroom. "What? I thought he just took her home from the party?"
"And then somehow got her blazer back into her locker," Scott whines anxiously.
Dagny remembers how Scott told her about his confrontation with Derek on the night of the first full moon and how the same blazer was involved and the look in Derek's eyes yesterday in her driveway.
She doesn't know why she drives Scott to the Hale House, she just does. And she doesn't know why she and Scott ignore the flood of frantic voice mails and text messages they're getting from Stiles, they just do. She does, however, freak out when they pull up to the charred shell of a mansion and Scott gets out of the Ford Explorer and starts yelling for Derek to come out.
Dagny rolls down the window. "Scott!" she hisses. "Stop it!"
Because, really, pissing off Derek-the-mother-effing-werewolf-Hale?
Not one of Scott's best ideas.
But then Derek is there, and Dagny can hear Scott yelling about how he knows what he needs to know and how Derek should just leave him alone, but when the other werewolf talks he does so softly, and Dagny can't hear him, even when he motions towards her, and then he's gone just as soon as he was there.
Scott gets back into the car with this look on his face- the one she hasn't seen since that awful night in ninth grade that none of them like to talk about.
"Scott," Dagny begins, "what happened?"
He just shakes his head, and she gets the feeling that, just like that night, he doesn't want to talk about it.
She drives them back to school.
Like the idiot he is, Scott decides lacrosse is more important than his life. He also divulges a little piece of information that Dagny wishes he had told her earlier- The Hale House? Yeah, he smelled blood there. Apparently, he thinks there's a dead body buried on the property.
They make a plan to convict Derek of murder so they can get him off their backs, and Dagny begins to wonder when her life turned into The Vampire Diaries. Only instead of vampires, werewolves. And instead of the hot Salvatore brothers, two awkward weirdos who she has to remind to wash their clothes every once in a while.
The next night, Scott and Stiles want to dig up the dead body- or the other half of it, at least. Dagny isn't thrilled but she goes with them, and the entire time they're unearthing it, she's half-shivering, half-checking for Derek over her shoulder.
"We are going to get caught," she keeps muttering. "We are going to get caught, and he is going to kill us."
When they finally get the body up, it's a wolf. Dagny screams and jumps about a foot in the air, and doesn't stop screaming until Stiles whacks her over the head and points out that there's wolfs bane growing around the body.
"What?" Dagny shrieks, panting a little.
Stiles rolls his eyes, because Scott looks just as confused as she does and he thought he raised them better than that. "Wolfs bane," he repeats. "It's like, poison for werewolves. Haven't you seen that movie-? Anyway. It can't be a coincidence that it's growing here."
Dagny frowns and crouches down next to the little purple flower. Tentatively, she reaches forward to pluck it...
...and ends up ripping up a huge piece of rope.
She and the boys share a look, and then, as they watch, she tugs more and more up until they see the huge spiral of ripped-up dirt it's made around the hole where the body is. And Dagny knows that has to mean something- something that probably doesn't spell good things for them.
"Dagny," Scott says softly a few seconds later, "Stiles."
"What-?"
And then Dagny looks down and sees.
That wolf head?
It's human now.
They do what any sane person would do (or at least Dagny does) and call the police- aka Stiles' dad. He isn't very happy when he sees it's them, and neither is Derek Hale when he's stuffed into the back of a cruiser. And then Stiles decides to go talk to him.
And that's when Dagny begins to seriously wonder why she's friends with these boys in the first place.
The night of Scott's first game, Dagny sits with Allison, Mr. Argent-who-is-apparently-a-hunter, Lydia, Mrs. McCall, and Sheriff Stillinski. Despite the fact that she's pretty much sure something is going to go wrong and someone is going to die, Dagny brings the cookies that she baked earlier that evening, spurned by the whole werewolf debacle. Allison is extremely excited about them and eats half the batch by herself. Lydia graciously denies them and instead compliments Dagny on her forest green sweater and black coat combo. Dagny wonders if this is what it's like being friends with girls.
When Scott begins to werewolf-out (leading to Beacon Hills going up, like, five points in the space of fifteen minutes) Dagny leaps to her feet, mumbles some excuse to the others, and races down the metal bleachers to where Stiles is sitting on the probably-extremely-cold bench.
"Oh my God," is all Dagny says when Stiles turns around and stares at her, and her favorite expression is basically all that the two of them need to sum up the situation.
Beacon Hills wins. The crowd rushes the field. Stiles cheers, picks Dagny up and twirls her in a circle. When he sets her down, she sees Scott. She sees Scott about to go full werewolf- in the middle of a crowded lacrosse field. Dagny grabs him and runs for the locker room, not checking to see if Stiles follows.
He doesn't.
Later, Dagny wishes that he had.
The minute Scott lashes out, Dagny has her first flashback in months. She winces and feels the iron gates slam down around her again, and when Scott punches the mirror and glass sprays everywhere, she screams.
Scott snaps out of it and stares at her, realizing what he's done.
"Dagny," he says hoarsely, "I am so-"
"Don't," she interrupts, wheezing. "Just don't, Scott."
Scott whimpers like the puppy he is and runs bloody, not-fully-human-yet hands through his sweaty hair. "But you-"
"I'm fine," Dagny lies through her teeth, and it is so, so hard to keep herself from breaking. "Really, I-"
"Scott?" Allison's soft voice calls from outside the locker room.
Dagny sucks in a deep breath. "I'll leave," she says, and even though Scott looks like he wants to say something to her, he doesn't, and she leaves with a soft smile in Allison's direction that is so believable (and so fake) that Scott hurts for his best friend.
"Dagny!" a floaty girl's voice calls as she rushes back onto the lacrosse field. "Dagny!"
She stops short and turns, tucking a lock of blonde hair behind her ear nervously when she sees Lydia marching over to her.
"Um, hi?" Dagny says, and she really doesn't mean for it to come out sounding like a question.
"So," Lydia states, linking her arm through the crook of Dagny's like they've been best friends forever, "I totally forgot- you're on the track team!" She doesn't wait for Dagny to reply and keeps rattling on, "I actually didn't know until yesterday- you're so quiet and all so I guess not a lot of people know- but I was wondering if you wanted to go running in the park with me tomorrow at around noon?"
Dagny isn't actually sure if she wants to, but Lydia doesn't look like she's going to take no for an answer and Stiles is waving frantically from the bleachers so Dagny chooses to agree and pull away as quickly as she can.
"Oh my God," Dagny says when she walks up to Stiles and grabs his arm, "what? What happened?"
"Why were you talking to Lydia?" Stiles asks curiously.
Dagny scowls. "I swear to God," she begins, "if that is the only reason you called me over here I am going to end you, Stiles, because I am so not in the mood for this right now and our best friend almost turned into an effing werewolf right in front of me-"
Stiles slaps his hand over Dagny's mouth to get her to stop talking. "That's not why I called you over here," he says in that Holy shit dead bodies voice that he uses sometimes. "I just talked to my dad."
"And?" Dagny snarls irritably, shoving his arm away from her nose because, yes, he spent the entire game on the bench, but he still smells disgusting-
"Derek Hale was released from prison," Stiles says.
Something like a bucket of ice drops into Dagny's stomach.
"Oh my God," she whispers, "what?"
Stiles shrugs dejectedly and plops down on one of the metal bleachers. Dagny thinks he looks like he could use a drink.
"That body we found?" Stiles says. "It was ripped apart by an animal. Derek? He's not an animal. And..."
"And?" Dagny probes, and she's really, really freaked out because- Oh my God, Derek is going to murder them.
"The body belonged to Laura Hale... Derek's sister."