Heartbeat // A Derek Hale Love Story (Teen Wolf)

Where Do I Even Start?

I let the words settle, resisting the urge to bark back the retort of disbelief that echoed in my mind.

Instead, I found myself asking softly, "What are you, then?"

"A werewolf."

The memory of those bright blue eyes flashed across my mind, that roar that came from his chest.

"Oh."

Derek stopped digging, and his gaze snapped to me, his brows furrowed. "That's it?"

A swarm of questions flew through my mind, like What the fuck, werewolves aren't real, are you high? but no sound left my mouth. I just stared at him. I think I was in shock. I should've probably been sitting down.

"Werewolves aren't real," I heard myself say, meeting those sharp eyes of his.

He set down his shovel and stepped out of the shallow hole I'd barely noticed him create. I should've flinched as he moved towards me. But I didn't.

"They are," he said. "Do you want me to show you?"

I must have been dreaming. "Sure." The word exiting my mouth was a surprise. I didn't recognize my own voice.

"Try not to yell," he murmured, before stepping away from me again, rolling his neck.

A low growl rumbled from deep in his chest, and he jerked his chin down, baring his teeth to reveal elongated canines. His irises burst into that same blue glow as last night, two stars in the night sky I could get trapped in. I should've been terrified.

I was too lost staring at the complexity of the colour of those eyes to notice that his entire browline had shifted, along with hair on his cheeks growing out. It happened instantly. I felt like I was looking at a different person for a moment, as claws slid over his nails, to lengths that made my blood cold.

My breath caught in my throat.

I should've been screaming, taking to the hills, running for my life. But my feet didn't move. I just couldn't stop staring.

Despite the terror railing like a beast locked in the cage of my chest, a waterfall of clarity cascaded over me. The questions of last night were negligible in the face of what I now knew.

"That's why you left last night?" I swallowed, not daring movement, keeping my eyes locked on his as the wolfish features faded like the tide, leaving only the lengthened teeth and glowing animal eyes and the face I knew.

He nodded. "You kicked something into the water that had something poisonous to me in it," he explained. "I didn't want you to know what I was."

"Why?" My first question.

His words were barely more than a whisper. "Everyone who knows about me... they end up hurt."

Derek's POV

She didn't disagree, and her silence cracked something already broken in me. The fear in her eyes tore me apart. I was a monster. She'd never look at me like she had last night again. Like she loved me. 

I turned back to the shallow grave forming beside the house and buried the blade of the shovel in the earth again. I wasn't sure if she would leave or keep standing there, staring at me. Her gaze burned into my back like a brand.

After a few minutes of digging, I pricked my ears to the sound of rustling leaves and shifting pressure from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder, finding her sitting cross-legged and looking up at me, the fear in her scent ebbing slightly.

"How did you get like this?" she asked, the almost-innocence of the question sparking a tiny bit of hope in my chest.

"I was born like this," I replied. "My whole family were werewolves."

"Do you turn into an actual wolf on full moons?"

I laughed bitterly, angling myself toward her before I went back to digging. "No, only Alphas can do that." Laura's body again became a painful awareness as I spoke.

"You're not an Alpha?"

I shook my head with gritted teeth. "No. Laura was my Alpha, but..."

"Who's the Alpha now?"

"I don't know," I admitted darkly. "Whoever killed her."

"Shit," Lillian breathed. "So whoever kills an Alpha gets their power?"

"Yeah," I replied.

Fear edged her voice as she asked, "Does the Alpha have control over you?"

"No," I said, the hole's walls rising around me to my knees. "Not yet, at least. But if I meet them, I should be able to figure out who it is." And when I did, they better be scared.

"Don't get yourself killed," Lillian said, and despite the benevolence in her words, I flinched.

"I'm so sorry," she said immediately. "Bad timing."

I shrugged. "It's true. I have to be more careful." I narrowed my eyes. "I've never not known who my Alpha is."

Lillian's eyes got big all of a sudden. "What do Alphas look like when they shift?"

"Some of them are different," I said. "But they usually get bigger than normal wolves."

"Do you remember the night we first met?" she asked, looking up at me like she'd had some revelation.

"Yeah, when I almost ran you over in the driveway?"

Lillian nodded vigorously. "Yeah. A few minutes before that I was chased up a tree by a thing that I thought might have been a bear but it looked vaguely wolf-like. It roared at me. Do you think it was an Alpha?"

"It might have been an Alpha, but Laura's wolf form was different. Her wolf was small. It wouldn't have been her. She hasn't been in town for a long time. Until now." I couldn't glance back at her body. What was left of it. Not without bile rising in my throat.

The word 'was' that now described her was incomprehensible.

It left a hole in me that I didn't know how to fix.