Stiles wouldn't admit it, but it was actually the Desert Wolf herself who convinced Davis Peterson to go with the plan of using Derek for bait.
Stiles was undergoing security checks and helping with the search for the Desert Wolf at the office—which was indeed a FBI field office with the odd, secret branch of the CIA that Davis worked for attached to it in a sort of vague, unofficial way that Derek didn't really understand—when the Desert Wolf contacted Derek.
"It's because I had you pay for our room with your credit card," Stiles said later. "She found you that way, and now my plan is totally going to work."
Derek wasn't completely convinced that this had been Stiles' plan all along. He'd been sitting in the motel room he and Stiles had been sharing for the last couple of weeks, when suddenly the motel phone rang. Stiles hadn't been around to whisper-coach him in what to say since he'd gone into the FBI office that morning alone.
"I told you if I found you I'd kill you," the voice said.
Derek recognized her voice from the last time she'd called to threaten Braeden and demanded to be put on speakerphone so Derek could hear, too. She sounded kind of raspy.
"I'm not following you," he said. "What do you care if I go to Vegas with my buddy?"
"Cut the crap. I'm serious," she said.
"If you were serious I'd already be dead," Derek scoffed.
"You shouldn't be in Vegas. You know that's where Peterson is. If the government learns that you found me, they'll make your life miserable until you find me for them again. Please, just get off the grid for a while. Braeden might have gone to Peterson already. I don't want to have to hurt you—"
Remembering Stiles' plan, and trying to piss her off enough that she'd come looking for him, Derek interrupted. "Maybe I'll go to Peterson. If he puts you away I'll be safe."
"Don't do that. You'll be dead before you make contact," she said.
Too late for that, Derek thought. "I'll do what I have to. Unless there's some good reason I shouldn't go to Peterson?"
"Whatever he tells you, it's a lie. He does not have your best interest in mind. He's an enemy to all werewolves," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"Trust me," she said.
"Why should I?"
"I had a child with your uncle. A child who probably inherited Peter's gifts. I believe in werewolf equality and Peterson doesn't. We shouldn't be fighting, Derek," she said.
She hung up, and Derek was left wondering exactly what werewolf equality meant to a person like the Desert Wolf. When he relayed the entire conversation as nearly word-for-word as he could to Stiles, Stiles threw the paper from his straw at him. "Derek! She wanted to make a deal to leave you alone! Why didn't you agree?"
"I don't know who to trust. Peterson seems on the level, but DW does have a certain claim to sympathy with werewolves," Derek said.
"Allison slept with Scott and still shot all kinds of holes in werewolves, to say nothing of—"
"—Can we not?" Derek asked.
Stiles looked chagrined at what he'd almost said, and Derek tried to banish the thought of Kate from his mind. "Okay, I guess just because you sleep with a werewolf doesn't make you sympathetic. Especially since maybe she was trying to do something sinister like end up with werewolf DNA to experiment with. Besides, we're not recruiting her to join a werewolf revolution, we're only trying to make her not kill us."
"Well, you. I don't think she wants to kill me, yet," Stiles said. "Or were you talking about Braeden?"
"Stiles, you should go back to school. It's your senior year. Even if you don't go to college, you've got to graduate," Derek said.
"I think I could ace the GED. You should see what I got on the SATs."
"Oh, come on. You don't want to graduate with Scott and all your friends? Get in a big competition with Lydia to see who gets to be valedictorian? You don't have to worry about me, Stiles. I don't think she's going to kill me. You should let me and Peterson handle this," Derek said.
"Are you joking, Derek? The only thing you do consistently is always trust the wrong person. I am not going to leave you here with two bad choices and nothing but your instincts to guide you," Stiles said.
"My instincts do suck," Derek agreed glumly. "I can't even pretend to be offended by that. Maybe I shouldn't even trust you."
"I promise you, Derek, you can trust me," Stiles said, his voice uncharacteristically serious.
Derek nodded. Although Stiles hadn't always operated with his best interests at heart, Derek knew that Stiles would do anything to help him now. "Well, let's compromise, then. We'll try to get this show on the road. Bring things to a head, if we can. She made it sound like she was watching me, but she didn't sound like she knew we'd been with Peterson."
"So she isn't in Vegas. Because you paid for the motel bill days ago, and we've been to Peterson's office nearly every day, so if she was watching, she would have known you'd already contacted him."
"So how can we alert her to the fact that we're with Peterson?"
Stiles drummed his fingers on the table absently. "Would it be too obvious to buy something with a credit card in a place near the office?"
"Wait, she called the motel. Maybe Peterson can trace the call."
"She's gotta have a burner phone," Stiles said.
"Yeah, but maybe he can find out where she called from, and we can have cops swarm the place or at least the area the call came from. Then she'd probably figure out we gave her up to Peterson," Derek said.
"Sounds good. You wanna call him?"
"You've been doing the talking so far," Derek said. "Go ahead."
Stiles made the call and Peterson went to work tracing the call. Stiles looked at Derek, his expression annoyed. "Why did you have to put that picture in my head of graduating with all of my friends?"
"Is there any work you can do from here?"
"I think I can work on my final projects in some of my classes. Most of the requirements are online so I can do some of it, anyway. Christmas holidays are starting in a few weeks, so that'll be less school I'm missing. And I think we can make it back before exams at the end of January. Hopefully next term I don't have a crisis that makes me leave school for weeks on end."
"I forgot about Christmas. Shit. I'm sorry. Your dad is never going to forgive me for making you miss Christmas," Derek said.
Stiles shrugged. "Don't worry about Christmas. Thanksgiving is his favourite holiday, anyway."
"And you've already missed that. Shit, your dad is going to murder me. Why the hell am I worried about some CIA people when your dad is seriously going to kill me?"
Stiles shrugged and got out his iPad to start working on his final projects, and Derek worried about Sheriff Stilinski. Finally, he interrupted Stiles' research. "Will you please call your dad?" Derek said.
Stiles shook his head about eight times. "I can't, Derek. The second I hear his voice I'll tell him everything and agree to come home. It's better to just show up when all of this is over."
"You're wrong," Derek said.
Stiles went back to his work, and Derek left the room to think about things outside. He wondered about using the burner phone to call the Sheriff himself, but he knew the man could trace the call. And he was a cop, so he would trace the call.
He knew he shouldn't make a call in Vegas, but he ached when he thought about how Stiles' dad must be feeling. And if he felt that bad about it, how must Stiles feel?
When Derek went back to the motel room, Stiles looked up from his project. "Peterson called. Apparently DW is in New Orleans. They've already sent local PD to the vicinity, but I guided him towards the idea of bringing you there and using you as bait."
"So we're going to New Orleans?"
"Looks like," Stiles said.
Derek looked at Stiles closely. "How did you guide him to the idea? How did you convince him to listen to you at all? You are so damned manipulative."
"But not in a mean way," Stiles said defensively.
"You've got to watch that. I mean, you get everyone around you to do what you say all the time. If you're this good at controlling everything when you're eighteen, how hard will you be to resist when you're thirty? People like you end up…bad, you know? It's one thing to think you're right all the time, but when you can convince everyone else that you're right, too…it's dangerous. Sometimes getting your way all the time is bad for you. You could turn out like Peter."
"I guess I can't surround myself with yes men. I'll have to keep you nearby," Stiles said.
"Have I been able to successfully say no to you once this trip?"
For a moment that question made Derek feel raw and exposed, like he'd said too much, but then Stiles spoke like it was nothing.
"No, but you've tried to argue. Scott and Lydia don't even bother anymore."
"And your dad?"
"He's always arguing with me. Anyway, I don't think I'm in danger of having that much power over anyone anytime soon. It's not like I'm a millionaire megalomaniac or something," Stiles said.
"Not yet," Derek muttered darkly.
The next morning the boarded a plane to New Orleans. They paraded Derek around the area where the call had been made from, and then they booked him and Stiles into a motel and appeared to withdraw.
"It's a kind of an obvious trap," Stiles said.
"But it's a good test, too. If she's really as effective as Braeden thought she was, she could still kill me here."
"You never told me Braeden said that!"
"Don't worry, I won't let her hurt you," Derek said.
"I wasn't worried about myself, dumbass," Stiles said.
Derek glanced at him, wondering why Stiles was emitting a vulnerable, defensive scent. "Well, I'm not worried about her hurting me. I've got you to protect me," he said.
Stiles looked at him seriously for a moment, and then laughed. "Nice save, Hale. Seriously."
"How long do we wait for her to try something?"
"A few days," Stiles said.
"Before we get on the plane, you're calling your father. And you're going to stress to him that none of this was my idea," Derek said.
"I still won't be able to stop myself from giving us away. And I didn't put him through all this just to leave you before I know you're safe," Stiles said.
"I'll be with you the whole time. I'll hold your damned hand if you want me to—or you can talk to him on speaker and I'll slap you every time I think you're going to tell him all your secrets. It's perfect, because we can buy a burner, make the call, and leave the phone in the airport so he won't know where we are when we go back to Vegas. Come on, I know it's gotta be killing you, not knowing if your dad is okay."
"When you're right, you're right," Stiles said. "Let's do the speaker phone thing."
"Okay."
"Now all I want to do is call him right now. I guess he'd find me if I did that," Stiles said.
"Yeah. We have to wait. And maybe DW will try to kill me and Peterson will catch her and we can head home instead of just calling home."
"It will be so amazing to go home."
"Is that why you don't want to go to college? You don't want to leave home?"
"No. I just…I think people go to college to find themselves, and to train for the job they want to get. And to learn how to think and reason, right? Well, sorry, but I can think circles around most people with college degrees. And I know what I want to do. I want to be a deputy in the sheriff's department. They'll take anyone, you know? The life expectancy for a deputy in Beacon Hills is something like five weeks. They stopped requiring a college degree years ago. And as for training…well, I know exactly how to protect the citizens of this town."
"But what about all the experiences you might have in college. Like living with obnoxious roommates, and falling in love with the wrong person, and getting drunk and stoned…"
"Where is this fantasy land and how do I apply?" Stiles asked sarcastically.
"Finding yourself is a real thing. And don't you think you deserve a break from all the chaos?"
Stiles didn't reply, but he looked down at the floor and Derek could scent a little sadness on him.
"It's your dad, right? You can protect him as a deputy," Derek said.
Stiles shrugged. "It might be part of it."
"I'll do it," Derek said.
Stiles looked at him oddly, confusion written all over his face. "What are you talking about?"
"I'll sign up as a deputy and keep your father safe so you can go to college," he said.
Stile's eyes widened. "You can't be serious."
"I'm completely serious," Derek said.
"Imagine the badge bunnies faces when they walk into the station and see both you and Parrish," Stiles said in wonder.
"Shut up," Derek said. "Besides, your father's pretty hot. I bet he could have the pick of the badge bunnies."
Stiles apparently chose to ignore this, and shook his head. "I can't let you do it," he said.
"Why the hell not?" Derek asked.
"You're going to suit up and serve and protect a town full of low-life scum who covered up the massacre of your family? It isn't fair to you," Stiles said.
"Even I'm not that melodramatic, Stiles. Peter killed everyone involved in that conspiracy. Just let me give you something back. You're always putting everyone else ahead of yourself. Please, let me help you carry some of that weight on your shoulders," Derek said.
"Oh, you mean this?" Stiles asked, gesticulating wildly toward his shoulders. "It's just the world. No big."
"Please," Derek said.
Stiles smiled uncertainly. "Thanks, man. I don't know what to say," he said.
"Say you're going to finish up those final projects," Derek said.
"Yes sir," Stiles said.
Derek shook his head at Stiles' cheesy salute, but he couldn't help but smile a little.