Hungry Ghost

by Allison Moon

  Lexie followed along inside her head. She sat on the deck in front of a spread of five guns: three from George Koda and the other two the result of begging every high school classmate she still had in her cellphone. She took a break from cleaning them to type an email to her father. It offered an incomplete apology for what had transpired, and what was about to. It begged his forgiveness and, supposing she survived, his mercy. Before she could talk herself out of it, she hit ‘send.’

  At Jenna’s instruction, Sage had taken on the Pack’s usual full moon ritual: washing towels, packing sandwiches, checking the heater on the hot tub. Pretending everything would work out, or just praying it would, Lexie was beyond judging. She smiled at the illusion of normalcy Sage conjured.

  Raising the first rifle to her shoulder and adjusting the scope, she shouted, “All right! Who’s up first for target practice?”

  Jenna made a big dinner, and they all ate heartily, even Sage, who never rid himself of his cautious, semi-feral behavior. He looked like a tiger in a bow tie, resisting the urge to bury himself face-first in his dinner plate. Lexie found herself stealing glimpses of him. His eyes were the same, warm amber of Archer’s right eye. The color she missed the most.

  “Where do the trees dance?” Lexie asked, interrupting the cacophony.

  The girls gave her puzzled looks.

  “Oh yeah,” Sharmalee said. “What’s that place?”

  “Joshua Tree,” Renee said, snapping a green bean with her teeth. “Why?”

  “That’s a thing? Dancing trees?”

  “Not really, but they look like it,” Mitch said. “All prehistoric, Flintstones-style trees. It’s a cool place. Lots of artsy hippies and crazy vistas. Blythe took me there on our way to visit her folks a couple Christmases ago.”

  The girls smiled at Mitch’s shared memory, and Corwin squeezed his shoulder as he let his gaze fall on his mashed potatoes.

  For a reason none of them could explain, they left the candles burning all night, letting their slow diminishment count down the hours until the Pack’s departure. The house fell quiet, girls peeling off in ones and twos to find their last night of comfort.

  Lexie sought solitude instead on the back deck, staring into the woods, trying to keep herself from tearing off her clothes and running away from everything.

  “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” Sage asked, interrupting her angst.

  Lexie glanced back at the house, where sounds and scents declared that nobody inside would be sleeping for a while-- most of all Sharmalee and Corwin, whose giggles and moans bled through the walls. “You think I could?” Lexie snorted. “What about you?”

  “I’m more of a four-to-eight p.m. kind of guy.” His joke felt like a too-awkward attempt at fitting in with her community, her era.

  Lexie joined him by the Adirondack chairs, the white of the moon cutting through the patchy clouds to rain down silver light on them. “I don’t think I’ve heard you call yourself that before. A ‘guy’.”

  Sage smiled. “I thought it was more of a generality than a gender.”

  Lexie considered. “Okay, that’s fair.” His scent, which she’d been trying to ignore, curled around her like threads of moonlight. But the threads were made of more than scent; they stretched in front of her like antennae or cilia, sensing and grasping, reaching and pulling close. Batting them away like before would be fruitless, so she let them linger, drifting toward Sage when he breathed in, and back to her when he exhaled. It went like this for long minutes, her wolf curled in her belly, resting, cozy, readying, breathing with him.

  “Thank you, Sage,” she spoke, and when she did it was a whisper, in a language custom-made for her company.

  Sage stirred at the Rare vocalization. “It is my honor.”

  Lexie took his hand, letting the moonthreads weave them together, binding them with an ineffable truth.

  His warmth crept beneath her skin. It was too much— his hand, his smile, his touch— the sounds coming from the bedrooms above pushing her down a road she wasn’t ready for. She shook herself free of the grip she’d initiated and walked to the wooden rail, looking to the black forest and the white moon, trying to find meaning for what was happening inside of her.

  Sage stood and followed her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “That’s a silly question.” Lexie turned to face him, leaning against the rail.

  “No,” he said. “Circumstances are dreadful, that is obvious. Fates are unknown and blood will soon be shed. But you, here.” He pressed the flat of his palm against Lexie’s sternum, seemingly holding all her weight, that of her body and the rest that stacked invisible atop her, in that small connection.

  She felt into the space where his hand held her. His touch wasn’t the invasion she feared, but instead a call that stirred a new animal within her, one she had not yet encountered. Her instinct was to name it, but she resisted. That animal was not afraid nor preparing for war. It just was.

  The tension between their bodies thickened. She placed her hand over his, reaching to his face with the other. She stroked his cheek as she had upon their first meeting, but this time not from curiosity or disbelief.

  His skin was velvet and his lips so perfectly mauve. A flutter started in her chest and rose up her throat to her mouth, tickling her lips. She didn’t know if she wanted to, but she would, she did.

  She pulled Sage’s lips to hers. Unlike her kiss with Archer a lifetime ago, Lexie was lucid. Every detail was indelible. Every sensation was drawn into such sharp relief, the rest of the world may as well have been beyond the edges of the photograph containing this moment.

  The moonthreads of their bodies mingled, faint tickling like static electricity, not only where their bodies met but where they longed to.

  Lexie pulled Sage into her, as though she could open her chest cavity and have him fill the space that felt crowded with emptiness. Their mouths matched their rising pulses, tongues pressing, muscles flexing. Sage held her, and Lexie let herself be held. She pushed him and he relented. Lips and hands grappled, kissing like it was the end of her world.

  She took in his breath, and it felt ancient and strange, and she gave it back to him, new and transformed.

  Lexie could stay in this place forever, treading and retreading the waters of this desire manifest.

  She held him, drank him, pulled him. Her wolf didn’t threaten to overtake or shift blame. This was all Lexie.

  All her. Lexie stopped. Lexie prayed for one of the girls to wake and interrupt them, to rescue her from her betrayal to the self she’d thought she’d known.

  Whatever had opened in her slammed shut. The wrongness of it caught her like a swipe across the face. It was her consciousness, her humanness, scolding her, shaming her.

  She shoved away from the embrace, pulling her threads back in, tying them across her chest.

  Sage searched her face.

  She shook her head.

  “What?” he asked.

  “No. This is. No.”

  His brow furrowed; his lips parted on a question.

  “This is wrong,” Lexie said, as unmoored as the first time her hands became paws.

  “It’s not.” he said.

  “It feels wrong.”

  “Because of my touch, or what you think my touch means?”

  Lexie shook her head. How could she answer his questions when all her mind said was ‘flee’?

  Sage pressed one hand to his own heart. He reached the other toward hers, not pressing, barely touching, proving his delicateness. “Meaning is between things, not within them.”

  “I don’t know what that—”

  “Everything is a cocreation. Everything.”

  Lexie lunged at him and smashed her lips against his, hoping it would shut down everything: his gentleness, her shame. And it did, for a moment or two. But then the voices resurged, the ones she thought dead with Archer’s love. Dead with her mother.

  But they weren’t her elders, her ancest
ors, her ghosts. They were all echoes of her own voice, her own ideas of right- and wrong-doing, with eighteen years of reinforcement behind them.

  They tore her away from the immediate pleasure of desire fulfilled. Loudest of all was the voice of the recent past, of all she was learning about the world and her identity, turned back on itself to mock her in her ignorance. Lexie knew nothing, but now she finally knew it.

  She pushed herself away. “I’m sorry.”

  “Is it my form?” he asked. “This body?”

  Lexie wished she had an answer for him. She forced herself to try, hoping the truth would catch up to her words.

  “Ish?” she said. “If you were a woman, I would still desire you, but I would fear it more.”

  “More?”

  “Your power. Or the idea of your power. Women are … ever-changing.” Lexie smiled at the tiny irony. “I feel helpless with women. I don’t feel helpless with you.”

  “Some might consider that a good thing.”

  “Someone like me,” Lexie said. “That doesn’t mean I’m ready for it.”

  “And if I became—”

  “Don’t. No. That’s unfair. If this is the you that you’re choosing to be, it’s dishonest to be anything else.”

  “Don’t you understand? I am not this man’s form, nor the buffalo, nor the wolf. I am the space between.”

  She tried to imagine that space where there were no forms, no egos, no ids. She felt into it but it felt like a fiction, a pleasant lie.

  “Go,” she said finally. “Find my treehouse. Sleep there. I need to be alone with my sisters tonight.”

  Sage nodded and turned, waiting until he was in the shadow of the woods to doff his clothes and toss them on the lawn chair.

  “Tomorrow morning,” he growled, in a language only they understood. “Dream well.”

  Lexie tried to sob, but when she found that she couldn’t, decided to shift all night instead. She stabbed her belly with whatever emotion she could concoct, and watched her hand in the candlelight, her fingers flickering from woman to wolf, and back, so easy, so painful. The flickering candlelight allowed her to pretend she was hallucinating. Another memory of a life before. She wiggled her fingers, enjoying the shapes they made, their shifting geometries.

  One by one, the girls stopped pretending they could sleep, stopped forcing themselves to try.

  In Corwin and Sharmalee’s room, they murmured and shifted in bed. She heard Sharmalee giggle, and then the whir of Corwin’s laptop. They were watching that movie again, all giggles and sighs.

  Hazel slow-danced alone in her room, her breath on an eight count. Mitch was listening to music in bed. Renee scribbled in her journal, soft pencil on linen paper. Jenna was in the kitchen, ninja baking. Lexie knew that Jenna wanted to make sure they had food for when they returned. Lexie heard Jenna’s sniffles and knew her tears would be part of everything she made tonight.

  How would you spend your last night alive? Lexie asked her right paw, watching it shift on her impulse.

  How will you? she thought, dancing her hematite dark claw to her lips, teasing at her flesh with its hard point. Mourning the loss of first love? Yearning, warily, for the touch of that love’s brother? Fearing her death? Listing all the things she’d done and the things she’d never do? It all seemed so trite filtered through the lens of certain death.

  So Lexie lit another candle, lit the joint that Corwin rolled for her, and kept on changing, knowing there was nothing else to be anymore, except for something in-between.

  43

  Lexie moved through a fog the whole morning. Part of her remembered the old fishing ritual of waking before sunrise, packing thermoses and tackle boxes, filling coolers with ice and sandwiches. Except now the ice was for injuries, the tackle boxes replaced with arrows and ammo.

  They packed the back of her truck first, then the hatchback of Renee’s car. Blankets, ice, water, bandages, ammo, arrows, guns, and bows.

  Renee insisted on coffee, even though the rest of the girls were worried about the shifts and losing the contents of their stomachs.

  Bleary-eyed and furtive, the girls, Sage, and Mitch climbed into the cars and drove to the Barrens. Halfway to the highway, Mitch asked from the middle seat, “Lexie, can I borrow your cell? I want to text Stefan again.”

  Lexie knew better than to protest his earnest attempt at salvation and handed him her phone.

  They pulled off at the edge of the new highway and clattered over roots and rocks deeper into the woods, Renee’s hatchback bouncing and scraping behind them. As they disembarked far past the treeline, Renee asked again, “The boys?”

  Mitch merely shook his head. They were on their own.

  Renee put on her game face and gestured for the women to gather around her.

  “This truck,” Renee said, pointing, “is our line. We do not lose it. Understood? We are not fighting to the last woman, we are fighting to win.”

  The girls nodded solemnly.

  “If we call a retreat, you retreat. We are faster and fewer and we can run if we need to. Jenna, you’ll take the Bushmaster and cover the field from that tree. Sage will corral and distribute the Rares for ease of attack. We will all do as much damage from long range as possible. Reload and replenish at Lexie’s truck. Shift when you can, but only engage if you have to. This fight will not last long. We have to keep at it one hundred percent for as long as we can.”

  Jenna was staring at her feet and shaking her head. “I feel like this is dress-up. We’re imposters. We’re not warriors.”

  Renee jabbed a finger in her face.

  “These wolves made us warriors. We are all here because we chose to be. In this battle and on this planet. If you were a lesser woman, you would have let their rage end you. You’d have become a hollow shell of a person, the empty doll they all want us to become. But you didn’t. You chose life. You chose to fight. And you found your wolf.

  “Other women have experienced the same violence as we did, and they didn’t come back from it. They either died or spent the rest of their lives blaming themselves. We learned mercy, that being a woman wasn’t a fault that begged for punishment. We forgave ourselves, and we became stronger for it. Each one of us. And for that we should be proud. Now we will offer some of that mercy to these assholes—in the form of a swift death.

  “Each one of you asked after they got you: Why me? Why us? Why this world? The answer is here right now. To make us into the warriors that will destroy them. We are the monsters they made us become.

  “Are you with me sisters?”

  “Yeah!” Corwin shouted.

  “Are you with me?!” Renee shouted louder.

  “Yeah!” the Pack screamed together.

  “Are you with me?!!”

  “YEAAAHH!” the Pack screamed, half howl, half war cry, woman and wolf.

  Their shared howl echoed and died, and the girls shared one last look; conviction replaced fear.

  Sage stepped to them and said, “Sunrise is in twenty minutes. Take your positions.”

  Renee looked at the faces of her sisters, satisfied. “Jenna, get up in that tree and get ready to shoot these fuckers down.”

  Jenna scurried to the tree, slinging the semi-automatic rifle over her shoulder and carrying herself up branch by branch, until she found a sniper position and hunkered down. Mitch took a midpoint and passed up one of the ammo boxes.

  The girls scattered along a line, hiding behind boulders and tree trunks. Beyond their line was the Barrens: an open land of jagged rocks and dry brush. The forest would be their defense.

  Once in place, Sharmalee waved at Renee. “How do we get their attention?”

  Renee thought. “Hazel, do you want to run?”

  “Thirty miles before a fight? Hell no.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Sage said, stripping and tossing his jeans in the back of the truck. “Is everyone ready?”

  “Wait,” Sharmalee said. “Let me.”

  Renee gave her a wary look.r />
  “I’ve been bait before,” Sharmalee said. “I know how to make a dude think he’s got the upper hand.” She ran forty yards into the field, tossing her thrift-store mumu over her head to the ground. She wore a simple bra and underwear, brilliant white against the chestnut of her skin. She walked in the fog of her breath, her hips moving in slow circles with each step across the broken slate.

  Lexie could hear Sharm breathing slow and steady and whispering affirmations to herself that she could survive once more.

  Alone on the soon-to-be battlefield, Sharmalee lowered herself to her knees, looked skyward to the gray dawn, and howled. It was a small howl, like her voice—soft, feminine—fading too quickly before being reborn with another strong breath. She delivered her howl as a dare to herself and to her attackers, letting them know she was alive and ready for a fight.

  For a while, the girls stayed still. The last of Sharmalee’s sweet howls carried away on the cold breeze and she sat, waiting.

  When the first of the growls came from over the rise, it almost surprised the Pack, as if this wasn’t what they were waiting for. A haggard wolf stepped into view, his patchy fur matching his hoarse and gravelly growl. His rumble was joined by another, then a third, and two more wolves appeared over the rise. Sharmalee stood and froze. The three took stalking steps toward her.

  “Run,” Lexie whispered. She looked to Renee and Hazel, who both seemed to be willing the same.

  Run, she thought. We need to draw them to us, not go out there and get slaughtered.

  Renee caught her eye, a desperate look.

  Run, Sharmalee. Come on.

  But Sharmalee didn’t run. She stood stock still, frozen. Triggered and shut down, Lexie supposed.

  The three full-bloods seemed to find this amusing, their slavering jaws parting in menacing grins.

  Come on, Sharm, Lexie pleaded, her lips silently speaking the words as though reciting a prayer.

  The wolves closed in; Sharmlaee didn’t move. Renee took a step beyond her hiding place, readying to run and shift.

  Hazel stripped off her clothes and dug her feet into the ground, making sure Lexie and Renee saw. She gestured that she was going to run. Renee signaled up to Jenna in her tree that she should prepare to fire.