Hungry Ghost

by Allison Moon

  “What’s this about?” Lexie asked, shuffling into the kitchen wearing pajamas and her quilt.

  Renee blew the steam from her mug. “He’s trying to show them how to find the space between thoughts.”

  “How’s it going?”

  Renee shrugged.

  “Why aren’t you out there?”

  Renee sipped her coffee, made a face, and shrugged the question away. Lexie looked askance, but let it slide, eager to share her revelation.

  “I’ve been thinking about the poem. ‘Something new, something strange’.”

  “Okay,” Renee said.

  “What if it’s not werewolves, but something else?” Lexie asked.

  “What, like a change of attitude?”

  Lexie eyed Renee’s coffee covetously. “Well, maybe not like that, but what if it’s the space between that Sage talks about? Not the woman or the wolf, but the shift itself that has power?”

  “I dunno.” Renee noticed what had drawn Lexie’s attention and passed her the mug. “The in-between place, when I’ve paid attention to it, just makes me feel nauseous.”

  Lexie took a healthy gulp of the coffee and felt it work its magic on her bloodstream. She passed it back to Renee. They passed the mug back and forth, watching the Pack balance and sway in the yard.

  “Any word from your gun-toting buddies yet?”

  Lexie grimaced. “Yeah. I can pick up two tonight from one of my dad’s friends, but no replies from high school friends yet. Not that I’m surprised. I was kind of a weirdo in high school. How you would you feel if the spaz from Spanish class emailed out of the blue to ask for your Browning?”

  Renee returned her gaze to the window, and Lexie knew the answer.

  Renee stared at the girls as they strained against their bodies, willing them to bust open, to undo everything they grew up learning.

  “Do you know how to work a pair of clippers?” Renee asked.

  “Yeah, I used to cut my dad’s hair … when he had hair.”

  “How would you feel about shaving my head?”

  The upstairs bathroom got nice light through the skylight, but Lexie still spent awhile bringing in two extra desk lamps and Hazel’s makeup mirror. She was nervous.

  “I want this,” Renee said. “It’s cool.”

  Lexie took a deep breath and shook it out. “I’ve just heard stories … ”

  Renee cocked an eyebrow.

  “ … Of the way black girls feel about their hair.”

  Renee laughed.

  “Promise that if I fuck it up, you’re not going to toss me out to the Morloc first?” Lexie asked.

  Renee sat facing the mirror and mock-narrowed her eyes at Lexie’s reflection. Even sitting, her head came to Lexie’s chest.

  Lexie placed her hands on Renee’s head and let her hands sink into the black suds of her hair. She sighed with the delightful sensation. “Ready?”

  Renee stared herself down in the mirror, took a heavy breath, and nodded. “Fire her up.”

  Lexie pressed the clippers to Renee’s scalp and skidded them along the curve of her skull. Her hair fell off in clumps, like lamb’s wool.

  Renee ducked and bolted out of her chair. “Okay, never mind.”

  Lexie laughed. “It’s too late now. I just took a chunk out of your head.”

  Renee fanned herself with her hands and paced. “Okay. Hold on.” She rushed down the hall to Corwin and Sharmalee’s room. Lexie followed.

  Renee snatched up the bottle of Cuervo Corwin kept on her desk and took a healthy swig. Lexie poked around and found the DVD of the porno they’d been watching on repeat.

  “I don’t get it,” Lexie said, reading the back of the case.

  Renee wiped her mouth and exhaled. “That’s better.” Renee offered it but Lexie waved it away.

  “I think it’s about redefinition and community,” Renee said, swirling the tequila around in its bottle.

  “Porn?” Lexie asked, unbelieving.

  “That kind, I guess,” Renee said. “Like with Hazel and her stripping. The porno is probably Sharm and Corwin’s way of playing with new ideas, too, while feeling not so freakish for having the desires they do.”

  Lexie snorted. “Desires like dudes?”

  Renee shrugged. “Sure, why not? Dudes are fucked over by the patriarchy, too. I think it’s great that Corwin’s letting herself explore. Just like Sharm and Mitch for that matter.”

  Lexie nodded and stuck out her bottom lip, considering. Renee took another swig.

  “I guess it just flies in the face of the things—”

  “—Blythe taught us,” Renee interrupted. “Right?”

  Lexie nodded.

  “You came into the Pack at a weird time. We were tighter than ever, but that meant shutting out the outside world and any new ideas that might come from it. The outside world is a scary place, and we all needed to heal. Together. Now we don’t have the luxury of living in an echo chamber. Which means we’re going to in-fight and disagree. If we live to have that privilege, that is.”

  Lexie chewed on her lip and propped the porno on Sharm and Corwin’s pillows, like some sort of pervy teddy bear. “That’d be nice.”

  “Okay,” Renee said. “I am officially buzzed enough to face my bald future. Let’s do this.”

  Back at the mirror, Renee kept her eyes trained on her reflection. Occasionally she’d daub tears from the corners of her eyes with some toilet tissue. Sage’s commanding and soothing voice outside provided a muffled soundtrack as Renee had a moment with herself. Lexie felt honored to be a part of it.

  “How’s the book?” Lexie asked, gesturing to the tiny black book wedged in the back of Renee’s pants. She was enjoying her role as mock hairdresser.

  “Good,” Renee said.

  “Want to read me some?”

  “It’s a short book.”

  “This haircut won’t take much longer,” Lexie smiled.

  Renee fished out the book and flipped it to a highlighted passage.

  “Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory,” Renee read. “One: She will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”

  Lexie snickered at Renee’s on-the-fly gender reassignment.

  “Two: She will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. Three: She will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. Four: She will win who, prepared herself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. Five: She will win who has military capacity that is not interfered with by the sovereign.”

  “Well, we’ve got that last one covered,” Lexie said.

  Outside, yelps and shouts interrupted Sage’s soothing instruction.

  They ran into Lexie’s room, which had windows that overlooked the yard, to see Hazel flickering back and forth between girl and wolf.

  “Hold onto it!” the girls below shouted.

  Lexie ran down the stairs and out onto the porch. “Let it go, but catch it before it falls away. Like that slidey-pole drop you do.”

  Hazel squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on Lexie’s directions.

  “Like Pilates,” Jenna whispered, in awe.

  “Or Kegels!” Sharmalee shouted.

  Hazel struggled and sweated, but she did it. Like a zoetrope, Hazel released and caught her wolf. The transition disappeared, leaving only her flickering form released, chased, and caught, over and over.

  “Good, Hazel,” Lexie said. “Now grab it and let go just a little bit. Hold onto it as light as you can while still holding it.”

  Hazel whined and grimaced, contorting like Proteus as she struggled to obey Lexie’s commands. Her eyes squeezed shut. Her jaw clenched. Muscles and tendons corded her usually soft limbs as she strained.

  “There!” Lexie shouted.

  The girls gasped together.

  Hazel stood on two legs, two feet taller than her usual height, her back curled forward, and her arms like forelegs, covered in a mottled gray coat. Her snout was wolf-
shaped but shorter, her tail still curled behind her back. At the ends of her arms were her paws, half human, half wolf. Five sinewy digits—four fingers and a thumb—ended in scythe-shaped claws.

  The Pack and Sage stared agog.

  “This is it. Something new,” Lexie repeated.

  “Something strange,” Renee finished.

  40

  The Lit building was one of the oldest on Milton’s campus, and the professors’ offices were shoved into the basement level, each boasting a sliver of a window at sidewalk level. Rindt’s office was at the far end of a dark hall.

  Lexie suspected the literary types on campus liked this subterranean lifestyle, cozy in their caves, safe from the glares and blares of the outside world. Walking the dark and echoing hall, Lexie thought she might like it too. She briefly contemplated a literature major, which would mean three more years of reading, Lexie thought with a grimace. Then she recanted; three more years of anything would be nice.

  Lexie’s homework had done itself, or at least it felt like it had. She had copied down the script from her mother’s quilt, character by character, and then—in a different font—typed out the translation.

  As an epilogue to her paper, she explained the origin of the quilt and tried, obliquely, to describe her translation process. Her least ambitious hope was that it would impress Rindt. Her greatest was that it would make him trust her enough to admit he left her the book and the note. Some small part of her believed that if she ingratiated herself to him, he’d pick up the phone and call off tomorrow night’s Rare wolf attack. He spoke their language; he must be able to level with them.

  Lexie was too caught up in her absolution fantasy to notice the scent bathing the hallway. Werewolf senses were ineffective when distracted by the imagination of a desperate girl.

  Rindt’s office light cast a rectangular shaft through the frosted glass of his door. It slashed across the flecked linoleum floor like the harsh cut of lamplight in a noir film. Lexie was the troubled dame—she couldn’t cut it as the femme fatale. All she had to do was walk through that door and dump her problems into someone else’s lap.

  “Professor Rindt?”

  She knocked first, and then she turned the knob. Her imagination was no competition against the scent now. The ammonia of piss, the musk of sweat, but most of all, the metal tang of blood, pummeled her.

  She flinched, not against the scent, but in preparation for the gory sight sure to follow. But there was no body, only a splatter of fluids on the floor and bits of hair and bone. Lexie bent to her knees and peered into the puddle like she was scrying. Smooth streaks of clean floor interrupted the brownish-crimson puddle. Tongue marks. The blood was licked clean.

  Lexie staggered to her feet, choking back bile. Professor Rindt had been eaten. She reached for the door and slammed it. She sniffed hesitantly. It had been over a day since the Rare had been here. She scoured the room for clues, skirting around the puddle. Beneath the bookcase she found a tooth. With a grimace, she pocketed it.

  The upper-left drawer of Rindt’s desk was locked. Lexie jimmied it. When it wouldn’t budge, she took her knife and slid it into the latch, torqueing it. It popped open with a metal clang.

  Lexie half-expected to find another coded note when she opened the drawer, a posthumous set of instructions. Instead she found a pewter letter opener, two hundred dollars, and a photograph. Lexie flipped on the desk lamp. The photo was self-taken; Rindt’s blurred bare arm filled the left side of the frame. He was shirtless, his vividly-colored tattoos even more elaborate than Lexie would have guessed. He whispered into the ear of a young woman nestled in the crook of his free arm. She wore a white bra and a bright smile. Bree Curtis.

  41

  “The Crow moon rises on Friday evening at 6:48 p.m.,” Renee said. The girls sat in a semicircle on the floor of the living room. They each wore sweat- and mud-stained clothes. Mitch cracked his knuckles. Hazel spread her legs and stretched, a warm washcloth draped over her neck. “We will attack on Friday, at dawn.”

  “Er, what?” Corwin said.

  “They’re planning on attacking us at the moon,” Renee said. “Archer’s pack fought under the moon, too. Each time. Rares are nocturnal. We need to use the element of surprise and turn their biology against them. With the sunrise at our backs, they’ll be at a disadvantage.”

  The girls looked to one another and shrugged.

  Renee continued. “Here are the things we know about the Morloc: As full-bloods they’re stronger at night in nearly every way: eyesight, stamina, strength. Each of them is roughly twice our size and twice our wolf strength, eight times our human strength. They’re smart, but they are wild animals more attuned to hunting prey by picking off the slowest of a pack and defending territory. We know they cooperated to kill Bree, but we don’t know to what extent they can work together otherwise.”

  Lexie nodded. “We don’t know if they know we’re prepping for a fight, but it’s best to assume that they do.”

  Renee nodded. “And if so, they have every reason to expect we will come at them as wolves. Because of that expectation, they will undoubtedly prepare for a moonrise attack. We’re going to get the jump on them. Questions?”

  “How fast are they?” Corwin asked.

  Sage answered. “Fast, but like a giraffe or an elephant is fast. They’re fast because they’re big. They span space in a different way than us. In a straight footrace they’d win.”

  “But in an obstacle course, we’d have the upper hand,” Lexie said.

  “So how do we make it one?” Mitch asked.

  “The Morloc live dispersed throughout the Barrens, just a big rubbly open space,” Lexie said. “We need to draw them into the woods.”

  Renee continued, “We’ll use Lexie’s guns as humans, deliver as much damage as possible, and then shift for close combat.”

  “That’s fine for Hazel and Lexie, but the rest of us can’t stay human the whole time,” Corwin said.

  “Yeah, they’ll be too strong,” Sharmalee said. “Five of their six ends are pointy. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “That’s why we need to practice our shifts,” replied Renee. “Hazel got there today, and I think we all can do it.”

  “You think?” Mitch said.

  “We’ll practice tomorrow. And Friday we fight.”

  “One day?” Jenna said. “One more day to train?” Jenna’s voice cracked. She blinked back tears.

  “And prepare,” Renee said. “I need three of you to go to the edge of the burnout and start digging trenches, running trip wires, anything we can do to make the space more complicated for the Morloc. And I need one more to go with Lexie to pick up the guns. We need as much firepower as we can gather.”

  “What have we got?” Mitch asked.

  Lexie shifted on her feet. “One pump-action shotgun, one bear rifle, and one over-under.”

  Only Mitch acknowledged the paltry list. The others didn’t know what any of it meant, but Mitch’s dismay was easy enough to read.

  “That is insane!” Jenna said.

  Renee crossed her arms over her chest and nodded, looking at her feet.

  “Renee, we can’t. This isn’t a plan,” Jenna pleaded. “You can’t send us in there without any training. Lexie’s the only one of us who’s even shot a gun. We’ll be eviscerated.”

  “Jenna, I understand your fear, but we don’t have the time.”

  “We don’t know that,” Jenna said, tears flowing unimpeded now, her ears growing rosy and her curls sticking to her cheeks. “Why couldn’t we go underground until after the moon, wait it out?”

  “The Morloc aren’t going to wait,” Sage said. “When the moon comes, they will draw blood on a scale larger than this town has ever seen. We are Milton’s only line of defense.”

  Jenna covered her eyes and tried to calm herself. Hazel reached out and stroked her back. “Do you realize what you’re asking of us?” Jenna whispered.

  Renee nodded. “I do. And you all shoul
d know this now: we may all die on Friday. We may lose, and then our teachers and our friends and our families will die too. But if Lexie is right about their plan, it’s better for us all to die than to survive a war that they win.”

  Jenna tugged at her hair. “What if you’re wrong? What if it’s not about us?”

  Lexie and Renee exchanged a pained look.

  “Bree was murdered,” Lexie said. “Whether she was supposed to be a sacrifice, an offering, or a sex slave, we don’t know. You can hide behind our incomplete information, or you can take a stand to help stop it all.

  “That’s why we have to fight,” Lexie continued. “Because even if we don’t play, we lose.”

  Jenna brought her hands to her face, a grimace tugging at her mouth, but she was only giving expression to the horror that all the girls were feeling.

  “I’m in,” Corwin said. “These fuckers are going to pay for what they did to Sharm.”

  “No way am I going to be a character in these monsters’ rape fantasy,” Hazel said. “I’m in, too.”

  Sharmalee nodded. “Me too.”

  “Yep,” Mitch said, rocking his body with his nod.

  Lexie looked to Renee. “It’s what I’m here for.”

  “Me too,” Renee said, with a smile.

  The Pack looked to Jenna, who clasped her hand over her mouth, her eyes bloodshot and heavy with more yet-to-be-cried tears. “Oh god,” she whispered. “I’m so scared, sisters.”

  Hazel crawled to Jenna’s legs, hugging them. The rest of the Pack stood and joined her, embracing Jenna from all sides.

  Jenna let the Pack’s hugs squeeze out the sobs. She choked on her fear as it tried to strangle her from inside. “Okay,” Jenna gasped. “Okay. I’m in. We can do this,” Jenna said it to convince herself, and it sounded familiar to Lexie. She once had to force herself to abandon uncertainty, too. Now she had shed it completely. She would not miss it.

  42

  Hazel led the girls through the shifts like she was choreographing a dance recital. “One, two, three, four. Keep breathing. Here we go.”