Chapter 26: The Banshee's Question
[Beacon Hills Memorial — Friday, October 21, 2011, 10:15 AM]
The text had come at 6:47 AM: I know what bit me. We need to talk.
Lydia Martin's hospital room was on the third floor — the same wing where Peter Hale's bed had stood empty two weeks ago, the same corridor Jackson and Derek had walked with the nurse Jennifer's voice echoing off the linoleum. The symmetry was uncomfortable. Jackson walked it alone this time, his left hand in his jacket pocket because the claws had twitched twice on the drive over and keeping the hand contained was easier than trusting the retraction.
Room 314. The door was open. Lydia sat upright in the hospital bed with a laptop on her tray table, a spiral notebook beside it, and her hair pulled back in a braid that was too precise for someone six days post-trauma. The hospital gown had been supplemented with a cashmere cardigan from home — Lydia Martin did not do institutional fashion.
The bite wound was bandaged. The dressing covered her left shoulder and upper chest, white gauze against the cardigan's grey, and Jackson could smell the antiseptic from the doorway. He could smell the antiseptic and the floor cleaner and the specific chemical signature of Lydia's perfume and the lunch tray in the hallway and the hand sanitizer dispenser six feet to his left. The senses were getting sharper. The world was getting louder.
"Close the door," Lydia said.
Jackson closed it. The click of the latch sounded like a gunshot to his new ears. He adjusted — filed the sound into normal volume, recalibrate — and crossed to the chair beside the bed.
Lydia didn't waste time on pleasantries. She never had. Her efficiency was one of the things Jackson had admired about the original Lydia Martin in the show, and it was more formidable in person — a mind that processed information the way computers processed data, except Lydia's processor ran on spite and caffeine and an IQ that left other geniuses winded.
She opened the notebook. Three days of handwritten notes — dense, organized, cross-referenced. She'd been working.
"California has seventeen species of predator capable of inflicting a bite wound of this size and depth." She flipped a page. "I've eliminated all of them. The bite pattern doesn't match canine dentition — it's too wide. The puncture depth suggests a jaw strength exceeding any recorded terrestrial mammal, and the wound is healing at a rate that my attending physician called 'unusual' before he stopped making eye contact and started ordering additional bloodwork."
She closed the notebook. Her eyes found Jackson's. Green, sharp, the eyes of a woman who'd been cataloging evidence while the people around her were still processing shock.
"The thing that bit me wasn't an animal. The thing that bit me was a man who moved too fast to be human, had red eyes, and spoke before he did it. He said—" She paused. The first crack in the precision. "He said, you'll do nicely."
Jackson sat in the chair and said nothing. The silence was strategic — let her build, let her arrive at the conclusion, let her feel the shape of the truth before he confirmed it.
"I've also been hearing things." Lydia's voice dropped. Not in shame — in accuracy. She was calibrating the volume to match the sensitivity of the information. "Frequencies. Voices, sometimes, at the edge of sleep. Not hallucinations — I ran a diagnostic on my own cognitive function using a Montreal protocol I downloaded from Johns Hopkins. I'm not psychotic. Something is... different. Since the bite."
The banshee. It's starting. The frequencies Lydia is hearing are the first whispers of the wail — the death sense that will eventually let her predict and locate deaths before they happen. In canon, this process was slow and terrifying because no one explained it to her. She thought she was losing her mind. Here, she's already categorized the symptoms and eliminated psychiatric causes before anyone bothered to visit.
"What bit me, Jackson?"
No evasion would survive this room. Lydia Martin had the evidence, the cognitive architecture, and the disposition to dismantle any lie he constructed. The question wasn't whether to tell her — the question was how much.
"A werewolf." He said it flat. No buildup. No softening. Lydia didn't need emotional cushioning; she needed data. "The man who bit you was an Alpha werewolf named Peter Hale. He's dead now."
Lydia didn't blink. Her hand moved to the notebook — a reflex, the instinct to record — and then stopped. She folded both hands in her lap with a deliberateness that Jackson recognized from his own behavioral library: the physical containment of a reaction that couldn't be permitted to show.
"Werewolf." She said the word the way a scientist said hypothesis — not with belief or disbelief, but with the clinical distance of someone evaluating a data point against existing frameworks. "As in lycanthropy. Shapeshifting. Full moons."
"Full moons make it worse. The rest is more complicated than the folklore."
"And you know this because—"
"Because I've been dealing with it for six weeks." True. Incomplete. Sufficient for the moment. "The supernatural exists. Werewolves are real. The thing that attacked the school in September — the spiral on the wall — that was Peter. The bus driver, the video store. All Peter. He's dead. Derek Hale killed him."
Lydia absorbed this. The processing was visible — not the emotional collapse that a normal person would experience, but the rapid reconfiguration of a worldview by a mind that prioritized accuracy over comfort. Her eyes moved — left, right, down to the notebook, back to Jackson — and behind them, the architecture of her understanding was being rebuilt from the foundation up.
"The hearing," she said. "The frequencies. Is that—"
"Related. Yes." Jackson chose his words with care. This was the edge of what he could safely share. "The bite does different things to different people. What it's doing to you... isn't standard. I think the hearing is the beginning of something specific to you. Not werewolf. Something else."
"What else?"
"I don't know yet." A lie. He knew — banshee, the word sat in his throat — but confirming it now would raise questions about how he could possibly identify a supernatural phenomenon that Deaton himself hadn't diagnosed yet. "I know someone who can help you figure it out. A druid — a supernatural advisor. His name is Deaton."
"Alan Deaton. The veterinarian." Lydia's tone carried no surprise. "I looked him up when I was researching Peter Hale's family. He was the Hale family's — what? Doctor? Consultant?"
Of course she looked him up. Of course Lydia Martin, from a hospital bed with six days and a laptop, mapped the network that Jackson spent weeks assembling. IQ 170 and the research instincts of a federal investigator.
"Something like that."
"And you." Lydia leaned back against the pillows. The motion was careful — the bite wound's proximity to her shoulder made every adjustment a negotiation with pain. "You ran toward the thing that bit me. At homecoming. You ran toward an Alpha werewolf with no weapons and no—" She stopped. Her eyes narrowed. "You're not a werewolf."
"No."
"But you're involved."
"Yes."
"More than you're telling me."
"Significantly more."
The honesty landed. Lydia studied him — the same gaze she'd turned on him during their relationship, the penetrating assessment that had prompted whoever you are now on the night of the breakup. She was reading him. Not with supernatural senses — with pure cognitive horsepower, the ability to process microexpressions and vocal patterns and behavioral inconsistencies faster than any lie detector.
"You're hiding something. More than werewolves." Her voice was quiet. "You've been hiding something since September. The behavioral shift. The breakup. The way you look at people like you're reading a script they can't see."
Close. Too close. Lydia Martin will figure me out eventually. Not the transmigration — that's too far outside her framework. But she'll figure out that I know more than I should, that my knowledge has a specific and impossible source, and she'll catalog that data point and file it and wait.
"I'll tell you everything I can. Not today." Jackson stood. "Focus on recovering. Focus on the hearing — when it gets stronger, or when you hear specific words, call me. Not text. Call."
Lydia closed the notebook with careful precision. Her fingers pressed the cover flat, aligned the edges, set it on the tray table at a perpendicular angle to the laptop. The gesture was controlled. Deliberate. Her hands didn't shake until Jackson looked away, and by the time he looked back they were still.
"Jackson." Her voice stopped him at the door. "Thank you. For homecoming. For running toward it."
"I'll always run toward it," he said. The words came out before the calculation could intercept them — honest, unfiltered, the kind of thing the adult mind rarely permitted the teenager's mouth to say. He left before she could respond.
The elevator doors closed. Jackson leaned against the back wall and breathed. The hospital's fluorescent lighting buzzed at a frequency his new ears couldn't ignore — a persistent, low-grade hum that lived in the gap between perception and irritation. His left hand was in his pocket. The claws had extended during the conversation — not fully, just the tips, the sharp points pressing against the fabric lining. He hadn't noticed until now.
Lydia Martin has werewolves confirmed, banshee symptoms cataloged, and Deaton identified as a resource. She'll have the supernatural history of Beacon Hills mapped within a week. She'll find things I haven't found. She'll connect dots I missed. And she'll never stop watching me.
Good. I need someone watching. The chimera is unpredictable, my meta-knowledge is degrading, and the timeline has shifted so far from canon that my advantages are narrowing. Lydia Martin investigating me isn't a threat. It's a backup system.
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