Lunatic Fringe

by Allison Moon

  “Yeah, well. It’s this world. Nothing’s gonna change that. May as well get used to it and just take a karate class or something.” She stood, picking up her suitcase. “You’d think we would have evolved past it as a species, but here we are, the same animals we always were.” She managed an ironic smile. “It was nice to see you again before I left. Take care of yourself. Don’t take any crap from anyone, okay?”

  * * *

  Campus was eerily quiet, and few students walked through the quad. Lexie wandered over the grass, wondering where Duane had been during all of this. She worried that Duane was the unnamed frat brother Anna mentioned. Lexie regretted not pressing for more details, though she was glad she had resisted being so callous. She kicked a tuft of grass and dismissed the idea. Duane couldn’t have been involved; it was absurd. She scolded herself for entertaining such a thought.

  Jenna stood outside the Sociology building, scraping caked mud from her boots.

  “Oh, hi!” she said, waving at Lexie’s approach. “You okay, sweetie?”

  Lexie shrugged. Jenna opened her arms to offer a hug, and Lexie walked into it, eager for the comfort of touch. She held on longer than would perhaps be customary, but Jenna didn’t protest. Lexie relaxed into her embrace, understanding for the first time what it meant to call someone a “good hugger.” Lexie sighed.

  Arriving at their classroom, they found it dark and the door locked. A handwritten sign was taped to the frosted glass of the door: Class cancelled. Campus-wide meeting at 4pm in Hunter Hall.

  “The heck?” Lexie asked.

  “That’s odd,” Jenna said.

  “Is this about Anna?” Lexie whispered.

  “No way. The administration is trying to pretend that never happened. This has to be something else.”

  Lexie crossed her arms in front of her chest, unsure what she should do.

  “Do you want to come with me to the Den?” Jenna asked.

  Lexie shook her head. “No. I think I need to be . . . somewhere else.”

  Jenna lowered her eyes. Lexie recognized the look from her own face. Jenna had something she needed to say.

  “Do you need anything from me?” Lexie prodded.

  Jenna’s face softened into the sweetest smile Lexie could imagine. “Can you walk me to the library?”

  Lexie nodded and waited in the way that Archer waited with her.

  The afternoon sun cast the campus in copper. The stucco fa√ßades of the modern buildings and the stone walls of the older ones all reflected warmth, despite the chill in the air. Jenna wore a hand-knit shawl over a light camisole, the yarn’s colors changing from blue to purple to green as the stitches lined up.

  Lexie said, “You look cold. May I?” She wrapped her arm around Jenna’s shoulders as they walked.

  “Thank you,” Jenna said, the warmth returning to her skin and her eyes. “You’re so sweet.” The gesture surprised Lexie as much as it pleased her to even suggest it.

  Lexie felt strong and big as she warmed Jenna’s soft curves. In that moment, Lexie felt as though she understood Archer just a little bit more.

  “Everyone’s been worried about you lately, Lexie,” Jenna said, as though the safety of Lexie’s arm gave her the courage to speak.

  “Me? Why?”

  “Ever since that night. Renee said you guys fought, and no one’s heard from you since. You’ve been missing a lot of class. We were afraid we scared you off.”

  “You did,” Lexie admitted. “I wasn’t expecting . . . all that.” The gruesome night felt like years ago, overshadowed by so much wonder since.

  “So, what then?” Jenna prodded. “You got a new girlfriend?” she smiled as slyly as her angelic face would allow.

  Lexie’s heart pushed into overdrive, causing her ears to burn red, answering Jenna’s question for her.

  “Ha! I knew it!” she bounced, her curls celebrating her winning guess. “Sharmalee didn’t think so, but I did.”

  “Really?” Lexie asked, feeling more naked than when in the treehouse.

  “You just seem, I don’t know, sexier,” Jenna giggled. “Like you have a new swagger.”

  Lexie nodded with a non-committal “Hm.” As much as her strength and sex drive were clearly byproducts of her lycanthropy, she credited plenty, particularly her newfound confidence, to her relationship with Archer. The woods were so deep and thick, they made her feel safe to release shouts and moans she would never have dared voice in a dorm or her father’s home. Moreover, in one week, Lexie had given Archer twelve orgasms in four different ways. It certainly bolstered her ego, especially since she had started October as a virgin.

  Jenna’s exultation ebbed and she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Things have been really tense at the Den lately. Blythe and Renee have both been completely off the rails. We used to do everything together, and now it’s just the two of them, making secret plans, doing their own thing. We’re all feeling left out and it just feels . . . off.”

  “Oh?” Lexie asked.

  “I won’t pretend that things weren’t tense before, but everything was really nice when you were around. You seem to have a calming effect on us.”

  “Fresh blood,” Lexie joked.

  “I guess so.”

  They arrived at the cement ramp leading to the library’s glass doors. Jenna smiled, though it lacked her usual luminosity. “This girl treating you well?” she asked.

  Lexie smiled and nodded, blushing with the flood of recollections.

  “Good, ‘cause you’re a catch,” Jenna said. “Thanks for listening. I really hope you stay around. You’ll be good for us.” Jenna caught Lexie by her shoulders and looked up into her eyes. “I know that Blythe and Renee are on their own tracks, but I want to let you know that no matter what happens with any of this, I’m glad you’re my friend.”

  Lexie wished this kind sentiment could enter her heart, but Anna’s sordid tale sat fresh in her mind, tarnishing her view of the world. For the first time, someone else seemed naive to her.

  But Jenna was too nice for such admissions. “Thanks.” Lexie smiled. “You too.”

  Lexie turned to leave as the sound of crying attracted both their attention. At the far end of the deserted sidewalk, two boys sat on a bench, one crying, the other consoling.

  Though Lexie had had enough of tears for one day, she and Jenna couldn’t ignore the boys. They approached, and Jenna knelt as Lexie hung back. Jenna spoke softly to the boy who was consoling the other.

  “Luke?” she said, as if to a small, injured animal. “What’s going on?”

  His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, as if he himself had just stopped crying, or was just about to start.

  “It’s Brian.” He swallowed hard, and Lexie shifted. “He was camping with the new pledges. They were attacked.”

  “A wolf?” Lexie asked.

  He nodded as his companion buried his face in his fists.

  Lexie teetered. Her head felt miles above earth, as if when she stumbled, the fall would take eons. “Duane?” she managed to squeak out.

  Luke shook his head. “They only found . . . pieces. They don’t know for sure, but they’re assuming the worst.”

  Jenna squeezed Luke’s shoulder and stroked his friend’s shoulder once in a silent benediction, but over his head, her eyes caught and held Lexie’s, and there was no naivete there now.

  Chapter 17

  Lexie ran through the woods from the campus to Archer’s cabin, heedless of the nettles tearing at her skin and the low branches snagging her hair. Though she knew she wasn’t being pursued by anything but her own terror, she ran anyway.

  Archer was hammering a shelf to the wall next to the fireplace, humming to herself as she worked. As Lexie burst through the door, Archer dropped the hammer, nearly shifting to meet an attack before seeing Lexie’s panicked face. She rushed to meet Lexie, holding her shoulders, trying to calm her with her touch.

  “Duane. An attack. Brian. They’re dead,” Lexie said through heavy breaths.
Her lungs burned, and she dug her nails into Archer’s biceps, squeezing as Archer begged her to calm down.

  “Who is?”

  “My friend, Duane. His friends. They were camping. I have to--we have to--”

  “Breathe, Lexie.”

  Lexie saw her knife and sweatshirt, sitting at the edge of the fireplace where she had left them weeks ago. She rushed to them, throwing the sweatshirt on and sighing with the comfort it gave her. The sheathed knife felt warm and powerful in her hand.

  Archer looked at her. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  It was impossible to tell the hour from the sunlight, diffused behind a thick blanket of clouds. The trees darkened the scene further, casting the hike in twilight. The trees here were nearly bare, interspersed with flame-topped birches.

  They jogged along, following only the vague description of the campsite that Duane had shared with Lexie and their powerful senses of smell. The woods were quiet here, and lacked the moist, fecund smell that Lexie appreciated most about the western woods.

  “Archer,” Lexie asked. “Would you change for me?”

  “Are you sure?”

  Lexie nodded. “It would make me feel . . . safer.”

  Archer raised her hand to stroke Lexie’s face. She curled her chin to her chest and inhaled deeply, releasing both the breath and her human body. Her hands curled and lengthened, her snout slowly extended from her face. Her creamy gray fur emerged as fine and soft as spider silk, covering her body with a coat both slick and soft. She stood solid on her two hind legs, towering over Lexie as her spine curved and lengthened. At the peak of her transition, she overbalanced, her forepaws hitting the earth with a soft thud. The wolf Archer blinked up at Lexie, her fire-and-ice eyes in an expression of vulnerability despite her physical strength.

  Even in her panic, Lexie felt blessed to share such an intimate moment with her lover.

  Archer’s footpads barely touched the ground, improbably supporting her massive frame. Each toe was tipped with a great claw, like a shark tooth. Her eyebrows shifted as she peered through the dim light, more expressive than her human ones. Her ears never stopped moving, either. They swiveled, shifting like satellites, scanning the air for notable sounds and pinpointing their locations.

  Between those brows, ears, and bristlefur tail, Lexie found it easy to read Archer’s meanings without verbal communication. With her great pink tongue lolling out of a lupine grin, Archer looked off in the presumed direction of Duane’s campground, ears alert.

  Right. They should get moving again. Lexie followed as Archer loped off.

  They hurried along in silence for a while longer, Lexie admiring the play of muscles under fur, until Archer came to a dead stop on a rise. Her nose to the air and then to the ground, she turned to Lexie, brows twitching with concern. Lexie sniffed and discovered it, too: the odor of blood, urine, and guts. Fresh death. Lexie dropped to her knees and sucked in the nauseating m√©lange of fetid odors. The ground reeked of iron and ammonia, sickening sweetness of putrefying bits of flesh, like rancid meat. Salt from tears and blood, sugar from the viscera of gutted bodies, daubs of it clinging to dirt and leaves. Lexie raised her head, fear driving her adrenaline, “What happened here?”

  Archer paced the ground, nose and brows twitching as she reconstructed the attack. She followed the trails of odors faster than Lexie would have been able to, even as a wolf, working backwards from the grisly result to redraw the details of the crime. Her tail swung in a wild arc, stirring up new scents, new clues. She snuffled quick and shallow before expelling it all in a great whuffing snort through her nostrils.

  Four boys, she chattered in her wolf tongue.

  Lexie leaned forward again, divvying out the scents that layered over one another like scattered cards. Underneath the blood and viscera, one scent emerged as the most potent: the dyed leather and wool of new Milton varsity jackets. Layered under that scent was another, that of beer. Others, peppermint gum and musky cologne, swirled among them. Brian. The smell of him moved in all directions. Alongside his smells flowed others: vodka, hair gel, marijuana, printer toner, hot dogs and golf gloves. Michael and Kevin, the other new Phi Kappa Phi brothers. She remembered them from the soccer game with Brian and Duane. Duane. Oh God, where was Duane?

  A dozen pairs of footprints danced over the dirt. Law enforcement, wildlife experts, hunters, and press had all been there to observe the grisly scene. In seconds, Lexie parsed out what had probably taken the police a round of forensics, fish and wildlife personnel speculation, and homicide expertise to figure out: four boys out camping, stalked and killed by a lone rare wolf. Two mauled, one partially devoured. The fourth, gone.

  Here. Archer padded over to the tracks of the werewolf, broader than her own, but not the same scent as the male they had encountered at the mountainside. A third werewolf. Archer was putting the pieces together while Lexie was falling to them.

  Did you know them? Archer chattered.

  Lexie dropped to her hands and knees, grinding her nose into the soil, pulling more hints of the crime into her body, drawing truths from the particles still clinging to the earth, searching for her friend.

  “Yes,” Lexie said, stumbling over to Archer’s side to slump down on the dirt. Her fingers dipped into the werewolf’s track. “Duane was my friend. I knew the others. They went to Milton. Duane . . .”

  Tears felt inadequate in the face of this horror, but they were all Lexie had to release the panic that rose in her chest. Her tears spilled over and dripped to the leaf-scattered ground. Archer nudged her, and Lexie buried her fingers into thick fur.

  Lexie whispered, “I’ve known Duane forever. He grew up in my town.”

  “And you smell him here?”

  She nodded.

  “Which one is he?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Have you seen him since you changed?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you know.”

  Lexie paused, searching the surrounding trees for answers. “He’s always eating fruit,” she said.

  “What kind?”

  “Apples mostly, green ones. He smells sweet, like the sugar from fruit, and clean--soap and this strange, intense shaving stuff.”

  “Do you smell any of that here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do. Take a deep breath.”

  Lexie sniffled, struggling to inhale more through her tears. “Kevin died there.” She pointed to a clod of dirt, where a claw had ripped clean through his body, leaving a gash in the earth and brown, crispy blood caking the soil.

  “One of the others, Michael, was there.” She pointed again, near the base of a tree. More disturbed earth, deep prints, gashes, and claw marks. “And over there, and there . . .” she pointed to two different places, “Brian was torn in half, and the wolf carried him there to . . . eat.” Lexie swallowed back a bout of disgust, the taste of bile crawling up her throat. “Duane’s scent is everywhere, but nowhere. Just circles.”

  Lexie sank her face into Archer’s fur.

  Archer nuzzled her, “Trust your senses. Try again. Close your eyes and see.”

  Lexie screwed up her mouth in disbelief. Though her nose was stuffed with snot, she tried again, opening her mouth to breath, letting the scents swirl over her palate and up to her sinuses. She pressed her nose to the ground, discovering the sweet scent of green apples, drifting gently on top of the rest. The odor was frail compared to the stench of decomposition.

  Though her face was burning, Lexie shivered, wanting so badly to disappear into herself like that night at the mountainside. She fell onto her back, watching the clouds cruise above the canopy overhead. Archer rested her body on top of Lexie’s, covering her with warmth, forcing away the cool curl of shock that was clutching at Lexie’s mind.

  With Archer a comforting weight atop her, Lexie released her held breath and let the odors tell her the rest of the story. Who was this killer? Why did it kill two to eat a third? Why at
tack four strong young men? Where the hell was Duane?

  Lexie lay beneath Archer, sifting through smells she didn’t yet know how to parse together into a story. Her muscles stretched under the press of Archer’s weight. Her vertebrae lengthened, her breath squeezed in and out, mingling with the hot moisture of Archer’s breath. Beneath Archer’s body, Lexie felt safe to expand her senses as far as they would go. She breathed in any lingering clues and extended her hearing to its furthest edges.

  It was through this seeking that Lexie heard the mechanical ‘click’ from the trees. The sound was measured and deliberate, made by someone who wished to remain unheard. Lexie knew the sound well. She’d heard it a hundred times when hunting with her father: the sound of a bullet being chambered in a rifle.

  Archer tensed atop Lexie, ears perking as she recognized it too. They both froze and looked in the direction of the sound, just in time to hear a BANG!

  The bullet seared through the damp air, penetrating Archer’s haunch and knocking her off of Lexie.

  Archer yelped and Lexie shot to her feet, scanning the woods downwind of the clearing. Crouched behind a pile of brush, shadowed by the impending evening, she saw three men training rifles on Archer. Lexie stepped between the men and their target.

  “Girl, get away from that!” one of the men shouted, lowering the rifle a notch.

  Lexie recognized the voice as her father’s hunting buddy, Hank. She had known him for years; he had often joined in on their father-daughter fishing trips. He was a good man, but a lonely one, with a dead wife and a junkie son. That was all she knew, and all she’d ever wanted to know. Even as a child, she had sensed that Hank treasured those rare trips with them. They saved him from the loneliness of a one-bedroom apartment and an arthritic cat.

  Now that gravely voice was high with tension as he yelled at Lexie, the only obstacle between three nervous men and a wounded beast.

  Lexie, get out of the way! Archer growled at her.

  “No!” Lexie shouted.

  “Listen, girl! Come here! Don’t be stupid! That thing’ll kill you!” another of the hunters shouted.