Hungry Ghost

by Allison Moon

  Lexie’s wounded Morloc limped back over the ridge and spotted Corwin at the same time. The look in his eye shifted from animal to villain. He loped down to her, kicking up bursts of broken slate beneath each hateful footfall.

  Lexie dove back onto the field. Halfway to Corwin, Lexie snatched up her discarded knife. She stretched every muscle to its limit, forward, forward, forward. She was in a footrace with a monster.

  Lexie edged out the Rare, grabbing Corwin beneath the shoulder and lifting. Each breath drove a dagger into her heart.

  She heard the footfalls, the eager snorts. She held her breath to dull the pain so that she could keep ahead of the threat that loomed only a pace behind her.

  It felt like being hit by a speeding car, Lexie imagined, steel at sixty miles per hour. She flew.

  She imagined wings spreading from her torso, like she was an angel, an eagle, or a goddess. But the body that crashed to the ground was the one she knew best. The girl, unarmored.

  She saw Mitch run for Corwin, lifting and carrying her to the treeline, disappearing just as Renee came into view, gun raised and shooting.

  Powerful jaws clamped around Lexie’s shoulder before the blackness took her. Each dull, jagged tooth pierced her back and breast, pinning her like a butterfly. The Rare’s hot, fetid breath warmed her skin.

  Blindly, she squeezed her knife. She wanted to die with it in hand, she had decided. A goodbye to her mother. Proof that she had tried.

  A stanza from the poem her mother had stitched into her quilt resurfaced in her mind: Thine was the prophets vision/ thine The exultation/ the divine Insanity of noble minds/ That never falters nor abates/ But labors and endures and waits/ Till all that it foresees it finds/ Or what it cannot find creates.

  She would have laughed if she could, the thought of her mother venerating a white, male, New England poet. But the last words stuck, as though she were conjuring an epitaph.

  Her heart fluttered like a fly against a closed window, too weak to fight but driven to try, to create the proper ending. The Morloc released his bite, rearing back to tear out her throat. She squeezed her knife tight and threw her fist into the Rare’s mouth, down his throat. Her arm slid down his gullet. From somewhere deeper even than her wolf, she dredged up enough energy to drive the blade downward. She pushed through resistance, cut cleanly through esophagus, trachea and tendons. Her arm and shoulder emerged from the slit; she wore his face like a fur muffler.

  The Rare may have tried to howl or squeal, but she’d already destroyed that in him. He crumpled into a silent heap atop her, his blood flowing onto her wounds, his weight compressing her until she felt part of the earth and part of his death.

  Lexie swallowed some of her own hot, salty blood, feeling it flow into places it shouldn’t be, suffocating her.

  She sighed. Okay. Over. Last breath. Here we go. She drew her last breath and held it, waiting for her heart to slow too much, to stop. But at the bottom of that breath, she found something. Her wolf, sitting, patient but alert, waiting for her signal. The dead Rare pinned the knife to her hand; she couldn’t release it. Her wolf was waiting for her, but she couldn’t beckon it. The knife prevented it. Her wolf whined, over-tamed, waiting for the knife to go away.

  Okay, she said. Come on then.

  Its ears perked up, and its tail thumped. It glanced at the knife, and its ears flattened back against its head. She licked blood from her lips and said, “C’mon. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter,” in the nicest voice she could muster. Her wolf stepped forward and Lexie transformed. Puncture wounds closed, organs mended, blood surged through her veins. For the first time Lexie felt the divinity of her wolf, its victory and sanctity. She lay, belly bare to the full morning light, paw drenched in the blood of her foe’s throat, still curled around her mother’s knife.

  She drifted into a silent, painless place. No temperature, no light, nothing at the bounds of her body, no body at all. She expanded, dissolved, each atom falling away, an aura like the moon’s halo evaporating around her. She exhaled and let her life go with it.

  A crack shattered her peace. Two cracks. Three.

  Shots fired from all directions, above, beside, behind.

  She lay on the cold ground, the hard ground, the solid, present ground, returning to her body. Time passed, seconds ticking like her heartbeat.

  Lexie’s eyes cracked open. She rolled her head back, the trees and sky where her sisters took refuge flipped in her vision. In the trees, people perched like angels, rifles at their shoulders.

  Everything was wrong, upside down, painful, twilit, and cold. Then she felt something familiar. Something from years ago, and it sparked a feeling she only experienced a few times, and treasured all the more for it. Heavy arms dug their way beneath her back and legs. Something heaved and grunted, and she flew again, this time warm, this time held. Not supported by wings, but by strong and solid arms.

  She watched the too-bright sky disappear into the black of treetops. Grunting, pained breaths replaced the wails and yelps of her sisters.

  Then she sank again, lowered onto a cold, metal bed, and the grunts became a whispered mantra: “You’re all right, Lexie. Daddy’s here. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  44

  Eleven more shots rang out, seizing Lexie’s consciousness and dragging it back to the light. She groaned and rolled to her side, watching her father’s friends, the hunters she’d grown up with, sink bullets deep into the felled wolves’ heads.

  “Corwin!” she heard Sharmalee cry. “Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god!”

  Lexie raised her head to see the Pack and hunters run to Corwin, who lay flat on the ground at the treeline, wheezing.

  One of the hunters shouted, “Get me a kit!”

  Renee’s voice countered: “Get her into the forest!”

  The hunter shouted back, “Don’t move her!” but Renee and the other girls ignored him, picking Corwin up like a saint or a martyr, holding her aloft in their arms.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Renee said.

  Lexie slid herself off the truck bed, finding her torso wrapped in gauze and her arm in a sling. She hurried to Renee, taking part of Corwin’s leg and shuffling along with them. “What are you doing?”

  “If she changes, she might be able to heal. We need to get her away from the full sunshine.”

  Lexie looked through the trees, but there was no moon, and wouldn’t be for many hours.

  The girls lowered Corwin to a bed of pine needles. Renee’s whispers emerged like an incantation. “Turn baby, turn baby. Come on come on.”

  Sharmalee was already crying, and Mitch held Corwin’s hand to his mouth, kissing it like a prince trying to break death’s curse. Lexie strained as though she could will Corwin’s wolf to life. It wasn’t praying, but it looked like it; it wasn’t pleading, but it felt like it.

  Lexie couldn’t help but note—inappropriate though it might be—the beauty of their disparate colors: Corwin’s skin too pale, too gone, too spent, and the melted, dewy brown of Sharmalee’s as she draped herself nude atop her dying lover.

  Ray and the hunters stood in a loose circle, watching in wonder as the girls negotiated with any deity or force they could, pleading for Corwin’s life.

  Corwin’s face lost its pink, and her breath stilled to silence. Sunlight broke through the pine cover, casting yellow light on her blonde dreadlocks and deep shadows beneath her eyes. The girls put their hands on her, keeping her warm. When Corwin’s breath stopped, no sound followed.

  Then, only the faintest squeak from Sharmalee as she suppressed a sob.

  Mitch wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

  Renee placed her hand atop Lexie’s, which rested on Corwin’s sternum. Neither wanted to move, even long after it became clear that Corwin’s last breath was expended.

  The dappled sunlight warmed them all, as they sat as though in shiva alongside their fallen sister.

  A moan broke the silence, followed by a gurgle. And a breath. Movemen
t beneath Lexie’s palm.

  Without knowing why, as though it were a new sensation, Lexie held Corwin’s chin, looking at the wolf inside like she did when she looked through the reflections on her knife. She called to it, inviting it to emerge but not to take hold. She held its gaze like an alpha. No. Like a peacespeaker, the pack member charged with making the disparate parts into something more than just their sum.

  Corwin’s breath hitched in a ragged gasp. Her golden wolf silhouette teased at the edges of her body. She groaned as it twisted her injured innards. Lexie lay her hand on Corwin’s furrowed brow, shushing her like a sister, calming the wolf that fought to emerge, while encouraging its power to heal.

  Wordlessly, Lexie called to Corwin’s wolf, asking it to lick the grave wounds, to seal the fractures in her flesh and mend the broken veins that filled her abdomen with blood. Corwin’s wolf heeded Lexie’s request out of a willingness to, not obey, but please. It understood contentment through allegiance and the power in submission.

  Corwin’s chin lengthened, the soft scruff of fur tickling Lexie’s finger. Corwin groaned again, but a sigh soon followed.

  Her wolf’s chest pressed up against Lexie’s hand. The other girls backed up to give Corwin more space. A cracked rib grated with each breath, and Lexie held her hand above it without touching. She coaxed the wolf further, to take on its full form, and as it did, the rib mended, Corwin’s chest swelled, and the purplish bruise of blood receded.

  Sharmalee held her hands around Corwin’s temples. Corwin’s yellow eyes opened once, wide, and then squeezed tightly shut.

  Lexie scanned the length of Corwin’s supine body, looking for any wounds left unmended and finding none. She crawled to Corwin’s face, covering Sharmalee’s hand with her own.

  “Corwin, sweetie,” Lexie whispered. She smiled when Corwin opened her eyes again. “Your body is healed, you can send the wolf away again now.”

  Corwin’s eyes were blank with remembered pain. She shook her head, her muzzle not constructed to form words. Lexie stroked her fur.

  “Thank your wolf for coming to you and send it back inside. She’ll always be there, she’s yours to call forth when you need her. But she is obedient to you. You have the right to decide how to claim your form.”

  Corwin nodded her understanding. With her next breath, she drew the beast within, leaving her honey-colored skin bare to the sunlight.

  Hazel’s wail broke the relieved hush that followed.

  The girls ran to Lexie’s truck. Stefan stepped away to allow Hazel room to throw herself upon Jenna’s lifeless body. Lexie looked for Jenna’s wolf as she had Corwin’s, but there was nothing to call. No life there, nor had there been for some time.

  Hazel didn’t cry but heaved, a ruckus of overwhelming emotions, all of which fought at her throat to generate sound. What came out was a dry croak and body-wracking sobs.

  The girls and Mitch stood in a semicircle around the truck, waiting for Hazel to expend or slow. Eventually, she wiped her hair from her face and glanced past her sisters to the nameless hunters standing like uncomfortable statues in the shadows beyond.

  A rustling at the horizon stole everyone’s attention. Ray reached for his rifle. Cresting over the hill was Taylor, face strained, Otter draped over his shoulder. Renee and Stefan ran to him. Renee took Otter, his limbs hanging like a broken doll’s. Renee’s eyes grew cold and dark, staring ahead, fighting tears. She lowered Otter onto the truck bed next to Jenna. Now it was Stefan’s turn to break. His face fell into a silent howl of pain. He reached for Taylor and Otter both.

  Lexie stepped away from the grief she could do nothing to assuage. She assessed the field. Twelve wolf corpses lay in the cold sunlight, individual red-black pools cradling their heads like oily pillows.

  She had forgotten about her nudity, or perhaps she just didn’t care anymore. Cold wind sliced at her skin, but she didn’t care about that either. Nothing seemed to matter. She stood in a sad state of near-grace, buffeted only by her pulse, her breath. Memories and projections didn’t enter her, they were wavelengths moving through a dead radio. It was all the present, and the sick sad rightness of it.

  She heard the whip of a coat, and turned to find her father standing there, holding it by the shoulders, an offering. The coat was coarse wool with satin lining—deep green, handmade, leather hoops around leather buttons, and a hood. “This wasn’t your mama’s,” he said. “It was mine.”

  Lexie expected Ray to avert his eyes, but there was nothing left to be ashamed of. She was his blood, his daughter, his pride, and his sorrow.

  She stepped into the coat, pulling her bloody and sweat-soaked hair over her shoulder as he eased the sleeves up and over.

  “I was skinny like you,” he said. “And strong.”

  He turned her around and buttoned her in with clumsy fingers, starting at her sternum and working down. When he was done, he smoothed the fabric over her shoulders and held her. His face twisted into a pained grimace, and he began to sob.

  Like a spark to tinder, his grief—or maybe his relief—ignited her own. She broke into sobs as well. His anguish was so true, so fierce, that she was powerless before it.

  She stepped into her father’s arms, and he squeezed her tighter than anything, ever. Her breath escaped on a wheeze and her bones protested. Her heart grew stronger in the effort to keep beating.

  She sighed and let herself be held.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” she whispered and he just kept on crying, a squeeze with a sob to tell her that he knew.

  “Do you want to sleep at home tonight?”

  Lexie shook her head. “I think I need to be with the Pack tonight. We’re going to have to figure out … ” Lexie took a heavy breath, “ … what to do with Jenna.”

  Ray nodded. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  Lexie wiped her eyes.

  “No, I’m sorry about everything. I won’t lie to you anymore.”

  Lexie laughed. “Sure, Dad. I’ll try and hold you to that.”

  45

  Ray offered to take Jenna and Otter’s bodies to the coroner. He’d say he found them during some volunteer trail maintenance. The authorities would examine her injuries, come to the usual conclusion, and close the case. The other hunters dispersed. Renee drove the rest of the girls back to the Den, and Lexie gave a silent, huddled Stefan and Taylor a lift back to their house. She had tried to thank them, but they both ran from the parked truck before she could complete the sentence.

  But she needed to thank someone, so she drove back to the woods.

  Below her treehouse, she looked up, catching the faintest hint of Sage’s scent. The cerulean sky looked like the sea from old paintings, too blue to be real, but beautiful. The air was cool, but it carried a tang of warmth, as though spring were making its presence known. She looked forward to warmth, longer days, shorter nights. She’d need a break from all the cold and dreariness for awhile.

  Lexie climbed, but she hesitated before clambering onto the platform, wondering if this time her dream would be made real, and Archer would be waiting for her. Maybe Archer had done what she promised and changed once more so that Lexie could try and love her in a new form. It was a perverse sort of thought, disturbing more than comforting, and Lexie shoved it back in its cage along with the rest of the unwelcome suppositions that populated her brain. She stepped into the tree and found Sage, nude and cross-legged, meditating in the center of the platform.

  He opened his eyes at the sound of her footsteps, and she sat down in front of him, happy he found this place a pleasant one.

  He held his palms out and Lexie placed her hands in his. Not knowing where she ended and he began, they breathed together.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He nodded with a warm smile.

  “Are you leaving?”

  “It’s one of a few possibilities,” Sage said.

  “What are some of the others?”

  “Staying.” He squeezed her hands.

  “W
ould you like that?” she asked.

  “Would you?”

  Lexie thought for a moment and answered, “Yes.”

  “I’ll need your permission.”

  Lexie nearly laughed. “Why?”

  “This is your territory now.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said.

  Sage shrugged. “Well, I’d still like your permission.”

  Lexie did laugh this time. “Why do you want to stay?”

  Sage looked around and inhaled deeply. “I like it here. I’ve been wandering for a while. This place, this town. It’s like a people-sized zoo. Very comfortable. Everything you could possibly need to survive in one handy little spot.” He examined her hands. “It’s an interesting concept.”

  Lexie nodded. “It is that.” She reached forward and grabbed one of Sage’s most perfect curls, sproinging it and smiling. “To the extent that you wish to,” Lexie said, “I invite you to stay.”

  He smiled and leaned in to nuzzle Lexie’s cheek. She grasped his cheeks, holding his delicate face in front of hers, and leaned to press her lips against his forehead. She felt a tiny sizzle and sighed.

  “Thank you for your help,” she said, pulling away.

  She stood and walked to the edge of the platform. “Do me a favor?” she asked. “Don’t tell Archer I was the one who let you stay. She might take it the wrong way.”

  Lexie was happy to be home. Standing in front of the Den, she realized what that word meant. Smoke rose from the chimney, and the scent of fresh bread wafted from the cracked-open kitchen window. She realized, for the first moment ever, she was happy to be here.

  Inside, Mitch helped Corwin assemble an altar next to the fireplace, Sharmalee brushed Hazel’s hair, and Renee sipped some tea. They all smiled wearily when Lexie entered.

  “Where have you been?” Renee asked. “We were worried.”

  “Thanking Sage.” Lexie sat next to Hazel, who touched her knee in welcome. She draped an arm around Hazel’s shoulders, bolstering her with strength, warmth, or anything else the other girl might need.