Hungry Ghost

by Allison Moon

  Lexie led them on a quick-if-not-direct route to the Den. For several tense minutes, Lexie tried to figure out which question to ask first and finally settled on small talk.

  “So you’re here to help,” she said.

  “I believe so.”

  “To fight?”

  “Fight?” Sage asked. “I can’t imagine why.”

  Small talk may have been a bad choice.

  “The Morloc. The full-bloods. You’re here because Archer isn’t. She sent you in her place.”

  “What will you be fighting for?” Sage asked.

  “Our survival,” Lexie said.

  Stefan stepped the flat of his foot down nearly all at once, leaving footprints of consistent depth and making him walk as though he were ready at any moment to make a running leap.

  “What makes that important?” he asked.

  Lexie looked aghast. “You want me to justify that?”

  “My people didn’t survive. Few do. The most vehement defenders of one’s right to live are the ones who survived various attacks against it. Why this town? Your pack? Why do they get my help?”

  Lexie’s ears grew hot. “Because this is our home!”

  “It is also the home of the Morloc,” he said.

  “They’re attacking us,” Lexie said. “Unprovoked.”

  Sage’s stare made Lexie question the veracity of her assertion. “Were they?” Sage asked. “Unprovoked?”

  Lexie didn’t like Archer’s gift. She was ready to call to the heavens to have them take him back.

  While Lexie steamed, Sage held her gaze. “I vowed over a century ago to never get involved in the troubles of humans,” he said.

  “This involves your kind, too!”

  “Then why shouldn’t I be fighting on their side?”

  Lexie tried to calm herself despite the provocation. “Out of nowhere, they’re getting all bloodthirsty, and we don’t know why.”

  “So you want to preserve the boundaries,” Sage said. “That’s what you’re after? Between you and the full-blood Morloc.”

  “Yes.”

  “Between you personally, or your people?” he asked with a cocked head.

  “Both,” Lexie said, growing impatient.

  “Because you could preserve that boundary by leaving.”

  Lexie glared at him.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because … my friends. My dad. My school. Everything I’ve ever known is here. This is my home.” She gestured to the tree canopy, pieces of moonlit sky cutting through the leaves like shards of broken mirror. The scents were rich and familiar.

  “And that’s enough?”

  “What do you mean ‘enough’? That’s everything.”

  “For you.”

  “Yes, for me!”

  “I believe you. That’s fine. But I don’t feel invested myself,” Sage said.

  “Your sister commanded you to come here.”

  “Commanded?” He laughed. “She asked. Via postcard.” He glanced to the sky, remembering the words his sister wrote: “‘Gone to the desert. Was tired of trees. The trees don’t brood here, they dance.’”

  Lexie tried not to let that sting. A postcard to a long-forgotten brother, instead of one simple message to her recent, bruised girlfriend. Nice.

  “This is bigger than me,” she admitted, trying to convince herself, too.

  Sage was silent, an invitation for her to continue.

  “The Pack has taken on the task of defending this town from assault. The Morloc are raping women to continue their lineage. Walking away from that would be complacency, accepting a world that tells women our bodies are mere vessels for male motivations. That’s bullshit. I can’t let that happen.”

  Sage looked at her, assessing.

  “I don’t care who was here first,” Lexie admitted. “Some things deserve to die off, like bullshit outmoded ideas of propriety and property. They want to rape us to continue their line? Then yeah, I’m fine killing them and watching their warped culture die with them.”

  Lexie breathed into that thought, now vocalized and impossible to recant. She worried that she had said something too brutal, too selfish, but she didn’t care. Her own sense of rightness won out over her anxieties of saying the wrong thing.

  This wasn’t about land. This was about her right to live the life she chose, and the similar rights of all her sisters, werewolf or not.

  They walked in silence for a long while, Lexie unable to shake the weight of Sage’s attention. It was both emboldening and maddening. She quelled her mind by concentrating on the crunch of frost-covered leaves beneath their footfalls.

  Lexie tried to tune into the invisible silver threads that clung to her chest like spider silk, reaching out to Sage. They pulled and drifted beneath her paces, flowing from her and catching and clinging to everything that passed. They drifted over low boughs, saplings and brush, catching in her hair and tangling together. They grazed Sage’s torso as he walked alongside her. She tried to parse their meaning, or even their veracity. She tried to still her breath. She listened to each invisible thread as it floated on tiny breezes. Ripples of air sloshed at her ear drums, as real as anything.

  “Who are your allies?” Sage asked.

  Lexie arched a brow. “Besides the Pack? I don’t really know. My father, but he’ll try to stop me. And the boys.”

  “The boys?”

  “Some guys that run in a pack here in town. Half-bloods.”

  “There’s another pack here?”

  Lexie nodded.

  “And you cohabit peacefully?”

  Lexie shrugged and nodded. “They’re gay.”

  “While other rogue half-bloods just wander around willy-nilly?”

  Lexie felt the need to defend her town against Sage’s judgments, but realized she didn’t have the patience.

  “So another pack. That’s useful,” Sage said.

  “If they’ll help.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s it.”

  Sage stood silent, naked, his expressionless face belying what Lexie hoped was an active decision-making process. Then he started to walk again, and Lexie followed. They moved west, along the ridge above Milton, meager lights of civilization peeking through the trees. Smoke rose from chimneys, and the town felt as bucolic as a Christmas painting. They wandered in silence until they reached the edge of the woods where the trees gave way to the backyard of the Den.

  Through the dense trees, Lexie’s house glowed amber, and through the windows she saw her sisters moving about mundane tasks, as though nothing was wrong, nothing was dying, nothing was falling apart. “That is your pack?” Sage asked, and the answer felt further away than ever, yet completely and thoroughly true.

  “Yes.” Lexie nodded. Lexie watched the girls in the house, feeling a modicum of guilt for wanting to keep his arrival to herself. But atop that guilt was piled high the potential of having his answers, insights, and history. Crowning that pile of potential was hope. Somewhere she knew, or at least wanted to believe, that Sage was their savior, that he would be their secret weapon, the deus ex machina, the white knight.

  Sage studied the house and said, “I’m a pacifist.”

  “All good people are pacifists until the wolf’s at your door.”

  Sage smiled, gazing at the Den. Lexie let Sage’s smell wash over her. She tried to dissect it in her brain, pulling the layers apart like the pages of a waterlogged book. In those layers she found black cherries, oak, oil, and amber. They caught in the back of her sinuses, heavy and rich, oozing like warm sap along the inner contours of her skull. She breathed shallow to keep the scent inside of her. She searched from the top to the bottom of Sage’s scent for a trace of Archer. Some river stone or moss to prove that she was here. But Archer was nowhere in Sage, save, perhaps, his genes.

  After a long pause where Lexie refused to look away, Sage finally spoke. “I’ll help you,” he said. “Of course I will. It is what I’ve come here to do. Th
ough I think you need wisdom more than muscle. If you’ll let me provide that, I will.”

  Lexie smiled and let her hand reach to his cheek. She expected him to flinch like any normal person, but of course he didn’t—he wasn’t. His skin was soft and smooth, so unlike the masculine roughness she’d expected. His cheek warmed her hand and she realized the intimacy of a simple act like touching. She wanted to withdraw her hand, but she resisted. Sage smiled at her. He opened his arms, and she stepped into his embrace. His skin was warm all over. Her brain was stunned into silence as it tried to make sense of her hugging a naked man in the woods. There was too much wrong with the idea to parse. Yet she felt drawn in, safe, held. A low thrum, like a steady heartbeat, held them. The energy inside her body began to swirl like flocking sparrows, diving and darting in an organized mess. Her cheek pressed to his shoulder. The sparrows rose and dispersed, finding their own paths along her nerves, pulling the electricity of her body into lightning bolts skittering beneath the surface of her skin. A sickening lightness fluttered in her belly. This wasn’t her wolf, begging for release. This was something else. Her … woman, perhaps?

  With that thought Lexie pushed away. Sage cocked his head, the corners of his mouth still upturned in a gentle grin.

  “Are you alright?” Sage asked, arms open from the broken embrace.

  Lexie nodded and tucked her hair behind her ears. “That felt … ungood.”

  “Is that the same as bad?” Sage asked.

  “ … No.” Lexie thought hard about his question, wondering into the truth of her answer.

  “Okay,” he said, lowering his hands. “What would turn it good?”

  Lexie stepped back a few paces. “Pants. Pants would make it better.”

  Sage looked down at his own nudity, then back up at Lexie. “Consider it done.” He paused. “Where would I find such things?”

  Lexie gestured to the lawn furniture with a nod of her head. “I’ll leave the clothes on this chair. You can meet everyone tomorrow, okay?”

  He nodded once. “I’ll be back tomorrow. I’m going to head back south.”

  Lexie nodded, though a question stuck in her mind.

  “This isn’t my territory,” he said, answering her unspoken query. “It’s nothing personal.”

  Sage backstepped against a lolling pine and shifted, his lean limbs bulking up, his softness broadening, his height looming. Lexie wondered if she should enroll in a physics class next semester, because something about this had to make sense.

  She took a deep breath, then another. She wanted to hide her eyes, his nakedness only more revealed by his shift.

  “This will all make sense tomorrow,” Lexie whispered to herself, as she watched his white form fade into the night.

  34

  “I saved your quilt,” Jenna said when Lexie walked in the back door, dazed and lost in thought.

  “What?”

  “Your mom’s quilt. I saved it.”

  Lexie had nearly forgotten about it, and she felt a stab of regret as she realized she was making a habit of that.

  “Thanks,” Lexie said, not stopping on her walk until she was nearly at the stairs, wanting to get in the shower before any of the girls smelled her.

  “Don’t you want to see it?” Jenna asked.

  “Um … ” Lexie waffled. “Can it wait?”

  Though Jenna didn’t answer, Lexie could feel her deflate. It had to be at least 2 a.m., and Jenna was no night owl unless the moon was in control. Jenna had stayed up, waiting for Lexie’s return.

  “I’m sorry,” Lexie said, stopping on her trajectory upstairs and returning to the living room where Jenna sat. The quilt was draped on a clothing rack in front of the fire, the light of the flames lighting it as though it were a shadow theater screen. “That was really sweet of you. Thank you,” she said.

  Jenna smiled that same sweet smile. “Happy to help,” she shrugged.

  The orange glow illuminated the delicate stitching, giving Lexie a new appreciation of the beauty of her mother’s handiwork. She forgot about Sage and Bree and Duane and all the other brutal disappointments and terrors that lurked beyond the walls of the Den. She breathed in a moment of simple beauty, her mother communicating to her across spans of death and age.

  Jenna rested her chin on Lexie’s shoulder and wrapped her other arm around her waist. “Your mother was a great craftsperson,” she said. “This is some fine stitching.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing, but I don’t really know what to look for. I’m glad you think so, Miss Expert.”

  Jenna smiled and gave Lexie’s waist a little squeeze. She placed her finger on one of the cotton threads starting at the far left side of the quilt and running right. “Well, this was all obviously hand-stitched, and the stitches are so small and the curves so deliberate and detailed, it’s pretty remarkable. See this part, here?” Jenna ran her index finger over a line halfway down the fabric. A horizontal line jumped into a peak and then down below the median level where it formed a U-shape, then up again into a loop that resembled a “p.” The line followed this soaring and diving pattern across the entire quilt.

  “It’s really strange. Most quilts tie onto the batting just with some random loops or jagged shapes, depending on your style. This one mixes curves and loops with harsh angles and even some random little dots and hyphen-thingys, but all of it in these perfectly-spaced lines. It’s really special.”

  Lexie followed Jenna’s finger, her vision aided by the fire’s backlighting. The stitches were silhouetted against the glowing orange of the rest of the quilt. She scanned the whole thing from top to bottom, appreciating Jenna’s assessment. It felt strange, viewing this object she’d had since birth in a new light. She stepped forward to run her finger over the thread too, noticing only on the second line she traced that she was holding her breath as a puzzle revealed itself.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” Lexie muttered.

  Lexie traced the thread that had held bits of filth only days before and now traced clean white lines across the quilt.

  “What?” Jenna asked.

  “What?” Lexie replied, ripped from the problem she was unconsciously trying to solve.

  “You’re spacing out,” Jenna said with concern. “You’ve been running your finger over that same spot for a solid minute.”

  Lexie looked back to the quilt flickering in strange shadows. Her brain was caught like a rowboat on the rocks. The clues battered at her, while the angry waves of flame scattered her focus.

  “These are … hold on,” Lexie said. She ran up the stairs to her backpack and returned holding the small leather-bound book from the library.

  “What?” Jenna stepped to the quilt and squinted as Lexie flipped through the pages, finding a page of script. “See?” Lexie said, pointing to scribbles in the text that resembled Arabic or Tagalog script, sharp angles and round bodies, soaring peaks and deep valleys. She looked back up at her quilt, which sported similar scribbles, all set with a single spool of thread.

  Lexie looked through the pages to find the pronunciation guide, matching them from left to right. Soo-too-kah, she said in her head.

  Lexie made a hard sound with her tongue. Tka, she corrected. Like a choke combined with a sharp percussive.

  Sutka, sutka, she read.

  “What’s that mean?” Jenna asked, hands on hips, squinting at the quilt.

  “Turn, turn,” she whispered.

  “What?” Jenna said with a short gasp.

  Lexie ran her finger over the backwards “L” shape that fell into a lowercase “u” and into a peak with a dot over top it.

  Sutka, sutka, fislume. Tan saong ritfoan.

  “Turn, turn, wheel. All things change.”

  Jenna’s jaw dropped. “Does it say that in the book?” She craned her neck to see the pages, but only found the script and pronunciation. “Where’s the translation?”

  Lexie continued, finding the sounds, closing her eyes and hearing the
words reform themselves into the only language she thought she knew.

  A gisaong knut, a gisaong xitkira.

  “To something new, to something strange.”

  “Does that say that?” Jenna said, in a volume too loud for the semi-sleeping house.

  Lexie nodded.

  “Go on!” Jenna squealed.

  Like jagged filigrees, the script unfolded.

  “Nothing that be still or … something. I don’t know that last word.” Lexie said. “The moon waxes, the moon wanes.”

  “Oh my god. Sisters!” Jenna shouted.

  The whole house came alive at once, and Renee rushed down the stairs. “Is everyone okay?”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Jenna squealed. “Lexie’s mom. She’s speaking to us.”

  One by one, the girls came down the stairs in various states of consciousness and dress.

  Lexie stood in front of the quilt, reading the stitching like braille and speaking her stilted translations aloud.

  “The mist, the cloud, will become rain. The rain to mist and again cloud.”

  She dropped to her knees and stretched the quilt tight to see the continued script. “Tomorrow becomes today.” A long straight line connected that passage to the next. “Art is the child of Nature.”

  Some of the words weren’t coming as easily as others. Lexie struggled to translate as much as she could. “Her beloved child, in … dunno dunno dunno. The something of the mother’s face. Her something and her mood. All her something beauty. Somethinged and soft and something. Into dunno and with a human sense dunno. She is the greatest artist, then, Whether of pencil or of pen, Who follows Nature. Never man.” She skipped ahead a line. “In Nature’s footprints, light and quick, And follows fearless where she leads.”

  Separate from the rest, another line, smaller. To my Daughter, whom I wish to live. Lexie read the last line to herself.

  The sound of the waning fire filled the silence as Lexie completed the translation.

  “That sounds more like the Tao Te Ching than a battle plan,” Sharmalee said at last.

  Mitch nodded as he rubbed a heavy palm against his forehead. “Yeah, what does that even mean?”