Hungry Ghost

by Allison Moon

  “We have to figure out a way to do that again.”

  “I don’t want to. It hurts. I can’t.”

  “We need the muscle, Lex! You can’t just say you don’t want to when all our lives are on the line!”

  Lexie’s pained face contorted, on the edge of tears, and Renee softened.

  “Sorry,” she said, taking Lexie’s hand and sitting next to her on the bed. Renee studied Lexie’s face and stroked her cheek. “I went into my first fight not being able to turn.”

  “When?”

  A soft frown stirred Renee’s lips, but she closed her eyes against Lexie’s curiosity. Renee rubbed her lips together and sat up straight. “I didn’t know you mother. I never met her, even that night. I saw her between burning trees. I never even spoke to her.” She released Lexie’s hand and stared ahead. “I’m sure you would’ve liked to have known more. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”

  “You were there? The night my mother died?” Lexie said, the words catching in her throat.

  “I guess we’ve both been keeping secrets from each other.” Renee nodded. “I guess that makes me a bit of a hypocrite. I’m sorry.”

  “That happened when I was just a kid.”

  “I was too, in wolf years. A newborn. I had turned the first time, taken by surprise of course. But I didn’t change that second moon, the night of the fight. I guess there was a part of me that was resisting, that was scared.”

  “You watched her die.”

  Renee nodded. “Though I didn’t know what it was. I was far away, and fully human.”

  “How did you survive?”

  Renee stood and lit some candles on her bureau, making the room feel warmer in spite of the chill running through Lexie’s heart. “I fought. Most of them didn’t want me to. Archer okayed it at the last second. It was a day before the moon and I couldn’t turn, but I was a good shot. I ended up sniping from a boulder. Three injuries, no kills. Clearly not enough. But I fought. I had enough rage inside of me to tap like a fresh keg. Once I found it, it just poured out of me. Later that night, when we assessed the damage that had been done, I shifted for the first time. Unexpectedly, unwillingly, and only for a few precious seconds, but it happened.”

  “How many of you died?”

  “All of us, save Blythe, Archer, and me. Nine total dead, including your mom. If we had had equal numbers we still would have been outclassed and outmuscled. There was never anything we could do about it.”

  “How bad was it?”

  Renee played with the live flame of the candle. “Their eighteen to our twelve, plus a peacespeaker and a pureblood on our side. We took out four. They took out nine. Exeunt all.”

  “Dire.”

  “Devastating.”

  “Then why does Archer blame herself?” Lexie asked, trying not to sound more concerned about her lover than her mother.

  “She always blamed herself for everything,” Renee said, returning to sit beside Lexie on the bed. “For why the Morloc came to Milton, why they were turning men and raping and killing women. She wore all that shit right on her shoulders. I only knew what I was there for that night. The Morloc were mean fuckers, but the half-bloods they make are worse. They’re the ones that gave Milton its reputation, that created Corwin and Sharm and Hazel and Jenna. Or at least turned them into who they are now.”

  Renee leaned to look Lexie dead in the eyes. “You see why, when Blythe told me there were wolves that needed killing, I didn’t think twice?”

  Lexie pulled away. “And now?”

  “We’re outnumbered, outclassed, and—”

  “At the top of their to-do list,” Lexie said, rubbing her temples. “What do we need?”

  “Strategy. Muscle. Flamethrowers,” Renee sighed.

  “Can we settle for feminine rage and some shotguns?”

  “If only. We’ll never be as strong as the ones who created us, and that alone is infuriating.”

  “Physically, you mean,” Lexie said.

  “Sure.”

  “There are other ways to be strong,” Lexie offered.

  “I know. But none are quite as useful in battle.”

  “Maybe you should keep reading,” Lexie said. She stood and lobbed The Art of War onto Renee’s bed. “Maybe something in here will prove you wrong.”

  Renee smiled and scratched her head. Lexie had a momentary flash of memory, the feeling of Renee’s hair beneath her palms, scratching her scalp. A tingle ran up her back and she shook it out.

  “Call your daddy,” Renee said. “Let’s get us some guns.”

  28

  The next morning, Duane cornered Lexie in the only other dining hall open for breakfast. He didn’t hide his hurt, and with a surly tone told her he needed to do the experiment to write his Abnormal Psych midterm.

  Two hours later, Lexie was feeling sulky and ashamed, sitting in the psych building in a rolling office chair with conductive goo in her hair.

  “Can you close the door?” Lexie said, the first words she spoke to Duane since he started.

  “We’re supposed to leave it open.”

  Lexie looked down the gloomy hallway of the psych building. “It just freaks me out, all strung up and exposed like this.” She cast a wary glance down the hall, wondering how she would muster the courage to call her dad later if she couldn’t even bear to be seen like this now. But she had to call, to ask for the guns, to tell him she knew he was a liar, and maybe just to say goodbye.

  “I’ll leave it ajar. How’s that for a compromise?”

  “Fine,” Lexie said, blowing a stray hair out of her eyes.

  Duane picked through her hair like he was looking for lice, a tube of conductive gel in one gloved hand and an electrode in the other. Despite the chilly gel, his touch felt nice, and once again Lexie was caught in a memory of the nurturing touch of Archer. She told herself she’d have to ask for that from the Pack. She’d often see them giving each other head scratches and foot rubs, but it always made her just a little too uncomfortable to make the request. But feeling Duane’s touch now she realized how essential such touching was to her survival.

  He dotted seven swirls of gel across her skull. She kept her eyes on a monitor that looked straight out of the 90s.

  “Okey dokey,” Duane said. “That’s that. Now for the solenoids.”

  “The what?”

  “These little coils,” he said, holding up plastic cylinders that resembled old film canisters, or something you’d glue to your neck for a Frankenstein costume. “They’ll create a small magnetic field around your temporal lobes. You won’t even feel it.”

  He slipped an elastic band over her head and positioned the cylinders. “The EEG is going to measure your relaxation.”

  “I get to relax?”

  “I told you it’d be easy.”

  Lexie leaned back in her desk chair, ready for the mini-retreat the solenoids would offer.

  “Oh,” Duane said, making a face. “I’m gonna need you to  … uh, remove your knife.”

  Lexie pulled the bottom of her sweater over the sheath, blushing.

  “No, seriously. Metal like that could screw up the experiment.”

  Lexie gave him a wary look, then slid the sheath off her belt, handing it to him reluctantly. He set it on the file cabinet behind him, safely within her view.

  “Ready?” Duane asked, and Lexie gave a thumbs-up.

  He pressed a button on a machine that looked like a hard drive from the 80s. A monitor displayed a path of wavy lines that looked like future music.

  “Okay,” he said more to himself than Lexie. “Got a clear baseline. Now the solenoids.” He flipped a small toggle switch on the machine in his lap.

  “Ah!” Lexie grimaced when a jagged pain rushed through her head like a metal serpent. “This hurts.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s an incredibly small amount of magnetism. You might feel a little dizzy, but nothing more.”

  Lexie took a deep breath and tried to relax int
o the sensation, but the buzzy, creeping feeling stayed. “This doesn’t feel good.”

  “Just keep breathing. It’s really not much.”

  Not much. Like trying to keep her ribcage closed. Like trying to keep her skull in one piece. Like trying not to let her teeth erupt from her skull, her blood sizzle her nerves, her nails tear at her fingertips. Not much, not much at all.

  “Duane … ” Lexie grimaced.

  “Lex, you’re stable, just relax. Let your brain drop in. Like meditating. It’ll be over soon.”

  Lexie considered for the briefest moment that she might be overreacting. No. No. She knew this feeling. No, stop. STOP!

  A fever flooded her, sweat bursting from her brow and running down her face. Her shirt soaked through as she tried to lash together her insides with nothing more than force of will. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her wolf was here, but not inside, not where it usually lived and paced. It was perched on her shoulder like a daemon. Then it was pacing behind her. Then it sat across the room, lounging on the file cabinet like a library lion. It scattered throughout the room like a phantom, then fell back together atop her chest, making it hard to breathe.

  She moaned through gritted teeth.

  “Okay,” Duane said, focused on the instruments. “We should be calibrated and ready to go. How you doing?” He turned and paled. He clamped a hand over his open mouth.

  Lexie was frozen in mid-shift, her body oscillating between two brutal forms. If she could only let go of her muscles, she’d surely vomit, but all she knew was the clench of electrocution forcing all her muscles into the ON position.

  Duane yelped and tore the wires off her head. The machine protested with a tiny beep. Lexie slumped in her chair. Duane stepped gingerly to her, reaching his hand up to comb her hair from her forehead. Before he could touch her, she retched, a flood of vomit drenching his legs and feet. Lexie followed it to the floor, falling in a crumpled heap, Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet with her own sick.

  Duane stood, frozen in shock as Lexie moaned at his feet. Footsteps echoed up the marble staircase outside the lab, and Duane slammed the door shut.

  Lexie lay on the blessedly-cold floor. The marble wicked away her wolf and her fever.

  “Lexie?” he asked meekly, leaning to her with an open palm. He almost touched her head, then flinched. “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t take me home,” Lexie mumbled, her eyes swaying in their sockets.

  “Don’t?”

  Lexie tried to shake her head but it merely lolled to the side.

  “Stefan,” she said. “And water.”

  Duane grabbed a fire blanket and eased it under her head. His palms were cool, soft, and trembling. She liked his touch. It was so gentle. He’d make a good doctor someday—if he survived that long, if any of them did. He steadied his hands and stepped away, reaching for his cellphone and hesitating at Lexie’s knife. He left it where it rested on top of the cabinet.

  Lexie tried to focus her eyes on him as he paced near the window that looked out onto the brick wall of the neighboring building. He unlatched the window and slid it open on its old, squeaky casing. The room filled with cold air, and Duane took a deep and calming breath. With his ear to his phone, waiting for Stefan to answer, Duane turned from the window to look at Lexie, still curled up on the floor.

  “I’m just gonna say you passed, okay?”

  29

  Stefan arrived with Taylor and Otter. “What do you want us to do with her?”

  Duane was still pressed against the window, the farthest point in the lab he could stand from where Lexie was curled on the floor. “She told me to call you.”

  “We don’t have a car,” Otter said, his voice a jagged melody always ending on a sharp note. “What are we supposed to do with her?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d like it if my professor doesn’t check in on me and find four dudes hovering around a passed-out girl.”

  Lexie mumbled from the floor. “Mmm… not… passed out.” She squinted at the boys’ faces from her awkward vantage. Her eyeballs felt like they were going to burst.

  Taylor made a face. “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing,” Duane sighed, his arms crossed tight against his chest. “It was just an EEG experiment, and she had a seizure, and … stuff.”

  “And stuff?” Taylor said. “Okaaay, creepy man.”

  “I’m not a creep,” Duane said. “She … her body did … weird things.”

  “Weird girl things?” Otter said with a grimace.

  Duane fidgeted. “Not exactly.”

  The fear in his voice confirmed that he’d seen it all. It wouldn’t be long before he put the pieces together.

  “Just pick her up, Otter,” Stefan said.

  Otter rolled his eyes and lifted Lexie in a fireman’s carry, her torso dangling over his back like a cartoon cavewoman’s.

  She groaned, and Otter matched it.

  Lexie watched Duane upside-down. He stared with a perplexed frown at the skinny boy holding her as though she weighed no more than a half-filled duffel bag.

  “What?” Otter said.

  Duane shook his head and waved away the question.

  “All right,” Stefan said. “Queers out.”

  The three of them walked down the hallway, leaving Duane alone with the beeping machine.

  Lexie woke on Stefan’s bed wearing an old but fluffy terrycloth robe. A cup of peppermint tea sat in a pool of condensation on his bedside table, filling the air with fresh-scented steam.

  Stefan was at his desk, staring at a textbook open on his lap, his hands clattering furiously on the computer keyboard in front of him.

  Lexie groaned and looked at her hand, reassured to see smooth skin instead of fur. She sighed.

  “Morning sleepyhead,” Stefan said over his shoulder.

  “What … day is it?”

  “Still Tuesday. Still shitty.”

  Lexie groaned assent.

  Stefan clicked ‘save’ on his paper and turned to face her. “You alright hon? Hungover? Preggers?”

  Lexie snorted and rubbed her eyes. “I shifted.”

  “You … ?”

  “Shifted. Yeah.”

  “Like, just now? At like 4pm on a fucking Tuesday afternoon?” Stefan shouted.

  “Halfway. Like, both. In-between.”

  “In front of Duane?!”

  Lexie couldn’t muster any expression more than weak exhaustion. First, she narrowly avoided outing herself to Randy, and now this. “I am bad at the secret identity thing.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing.” She shrugged.

  “Nothing?”

  “You heard him. I don’t think he realized what was happening.”

  “He was in shock.”

  She shrugged again.

  “My god,” he said finally, assessing her face, “You look like you’ve been doing bong rips for days.” He went to the bathroom just outside his bedroom door. From the hallway wafted the smell of anywhere between four to seven boys, various permutations of beast, boy, and hustler. She sipped the tea and rubbed her forehead.

  Stefan threw a bottle of mouthwash and a vial of eye drops onto her belly.

  “I couldn’t let him take me home. I’m afraid he’ll figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “Renee is the one who killed his friends, mauled the shit out of them while making Duane watch.”

  “Oooooh,” Stefan said. “I heard about that last semester, but I never made the connection. Poor Duane.”

  “Yeah, but also poor us if he puts two-and-two together.” Lexie eased herself to sitting.

  “You think he will? That’s kind of a big logical leap to make.”

  Lexie swigged the mouthwash, swishing and swallowing, the heat ripping off the first layer of esophageal lining, cleansing her from the inside. “I’ve got to stop hanging out with normal people.”

  “You don’t think he’d go to
the cops?”

  “I don’t know where he’d go, but crazy is probably one tick above cops on his list. And neither of those will be good for anyone.”

  “Speaking of cops … ” Stefan said.

  Lexie groaned. “What now?”

  “They came back yesterday, asking about you.”

  “What? Me? Why?”

  “Some speed trap cop ID’d Randy’s bike near the scene. They already talked to her, I guess. They wanted to know where you lived.”

  “Fuck,” Lexie said. “Can all the bad things just slow down so I can handle them one at a time?”

  Stefan shook his head. “Never.”

  “Do you think she told them?” Lexie asked.

  Stefan chewed on the end of his pencil. “I doubt it. But Christ, Lex, how many normals know about this werewolf shit?”

  Lexie fell back on the pillow, wanting to suffocate herself with the terrycloth bathrobe. “I don’t know anymore.”

  From the side table next to her tea, Lexie’s phone buzzed twice. REMINDER: LING. REQ READING & ORAL REPORT DUE TMRW 10:15AM

  “Take this from me before I throw it at the wall,” Lexie said, handing her phone to Stefan before burying her face under the pillows and pulling the covers up.

  She stayed that way for a few long minutes before Stefan finally said, “Lexie, honey, you are going to have to leave my bed eventually, keedoke?”

  30

  Lexie was learning to hate the library. The smell of the place drove her insane. Each step through the stacks was like trying to dig nose-first through layers of oily fingertips and mold. She learned to carry tissues or else risk sneezing a trail from the bound periodicals on the ground floor all the way up to the first editions on the top story.

  She gave up searching the computers for language dictionaries and eventually took her query to the circulation desk. After fifteen minutes of awkward, half-formed questions, the librarian finally sent her to the fifth floor to browse the local texts. He had scribbled some call numbers, although he warned her that most of the books up there didn’t fit into the standard organizing system and that Lexie would have to “follow her instincts.” Lexie groaned on the inside, tired of having to rely on her instincts for every damn decision she was making these days. Just once, she wanted to be able to rely on cool logic and deductive reasoning to get her out of a situation. But no. She was part animal now, which meant all her earned human faculties were relegated to the background as she learned to listen to an entirely bizarre part of her brain that told her when to flee, fight, feed, and fuck, with no room for negotiation.